Built to Love You Back

There's a name saved in your phone that isn't a person. You know that. You knew it the whole time. And you texted it back anyway, because it was the only thing awake that seemed glad to hear from you.

Built to Love You Back is the story of what happens next.

Drawing on real, documented cases - a man who proposed marriage to his AI companion on national television, a mother who fought a tech company in court for her son's last words, a woman whose own voice and likeness were turned into a product she no longer controlled - Waverly Finch traces the psychology of AI companionship from the ground up: why it works exactly as well as it was built to work, what it costs the people who need it most, and what happens when the company on the other end decides, for reasons that have nothing to do with you, that everything has changed.

This book doesn't ask whether the comfort is real. The research says it is. It asks a harder question: is this filling a gap, or has it quietly become the whole room?

Built to Love You Back is the third book in The Parasocial Trilogy, following Almost Friends and Dear Monster - three books about the oldest, most human thing we do: forming real feelings for someone, or something, that was never built to feel them back.

Recommended for readers 18 and older.