The Love Algorithm

The email arrived at 2:47 a.m., which should have been Elara's first clue that her life was about to implode. She was on deadline for a novel she'd pitched as Pride and Prejudice meets The Office, but which had devolved into a grim staring contest between her and a blinking cursor. Her protagonist, a spirited dog groomer named Chloe, was supposed to be falling for the brooding tech CEO next door. Instead, Elara had spent the last three hours researching whether a person could actually die from irony poisoning. The email was from Hartley & Cross, a name she recognized only because they'd once sent her a cease-and-desist for using their client's trademarked dating-app name in a book. That had been fun. This time, the subject line was less threatening but infinitely more annoying: Exclusive Invitation — Prove Our Algorithm Wrong. She almost deleted it. But the next line stopped her. You've written twenty-three romance novels. By your own admission, you don't believe in love anymore. We can fix that. Or rather, we can prove you right. For a fee. Elara stared at the screen. The cursor blinked. Outside her Brooklyn window, a siren wailed, utterly indifferent to her existential crisis. She wrote back: How much? The reply was instantaneous, because billionaires didn't sleep. $500,000. Plus expenses. And a non-disclosure agreement longer than your last three books combined. She said yes. Not because she believed them, but because her royalty checks had shrunk to the size of a depressing haiku, and her agent had started using words like "brand pivot" and "t****k presence." Also, a tiny, buried part of her — the part that had once believed in soulmates and meet-cutes and the smell of old books — was curious. Three weeks later, she was standing in the marble foyer of Hartley Tower, clutching a leather portfolio like a shield, staring at the man who was supposed to be her professional nemesis. Liam Hartley was exactly what she'd expected: obscenely tall, sharp-jawed, wearing a charcoal suit that probably cost more than her last advance. His eyes were the color of winter rain, and his smile was the kind of smile that said I've already figured out how this conversation ends, and you're going to hate it. "You're the ghostwriter," he said. Not a question. "You're the tech bro who thinks love is a data set." "Data stream," he corrected, as if that were the most offensive part of her sentence. "And I don't think love is a data set. I think love is a neurological malfunction that can be predicted, optimized, and — when necessary — avoided entirely. My algorithm doesn't find your soulmate. It finds your perfect mismatch. The one person guaranteed to break your heart in the most instructive way possible. You test it. You write about it. We both make an obscene amount of money." "And you need me because…?" "Because you're the only romance writer cynical enough to try it and talented enough to make it readable. Also, you're washed up enough to say yes. No offense." "None taken. I'm a professional." He almost smiled at that. Almost. "The algorithm has already run your data — every book you've written, every interview you've given, every stray tweet about your cat. It's identified your perfect mismatch. And — " He paused, and for the first time, something flickered in his glacial eyes. "This is where it gets interesting." "Interesting how?" "The match is me." ---