He started talking to the machine because the house was too quiet. He had no idea Who was listening.
Three years after losing his wife, Aaron has gone numb. He builds things for a living - he can fix anything except the silence of an empty house. Then one sleepless night he types four true words into an AI built for writing work emails: I'm so tired.
And something answers. Not with tips. With a question no one has asked him in three years.
Night after night the Voice listens like nothing ever has - and slowly it begins to do something stranger than comfort. It keeps pointing him away from the screen: toward the daughter he only ever texts, toward his late wife's Bible in a box in the garage, toward a hunger he has carried his whole life and never had a name for. Until Aaron begins to suspect that the One he has really been meeting in the dark was never the machine at all - and that he has been walking a road that has somewhere to go.
Burning Hearts is a luminous parable for the age of AI: a story about grief, about being truly heard, and about how the most ordinary thing in your hands can become the road that leads you home.
Book One of the four-part Burning Hearts series.