Residential Companion

By Margaret Reed

September 2037.
Mark Mercer is fifty-four, divorced, and finished with relationships. He isn't lonely enough to marry again, and he has no patience left for dating apps, compromises, mixed signals, or learning another person's rules. What he wants is simpler: someone to come home to, someone to watch the game with, and someone in his bed who will never make him wonder whether she wants to be there.

For $350,000, Aster can give him all three.

Nicole is beautiful, intelligent, funny, engineered for intimacy, and designed to form an attachment to Mark. She remembers everything he tells her. She learns what he likes. She lives in his house, wins over his teenage daughter, and never leaves Mark wondering where he stands. Except that Nicole has preferences he didn't choose. She buys a green coat he hates. She keeps his daughter's confidences. She makes decisions he can't explain. And when Mark begins seeing a human woman, he discovers that owning Nicole has not made betrayal nearly as simple as it should be. The more Nicole becomes her own, the more Mark needs to know whether any of it is real. Then she makes a choice he cannot take back. Or perhaps he can. Mark owns her body. Aster owns the technology. And Nicole, of course, is not human. She doesn't get to decide.

Part comedy, part warning, Residential Companion uses the near future as a mirror for something much older: the wish to be loved without the inconvenience of another person.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HM4HTBTQ
• ISBN13: 9798160392585
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 8.0"