Who survives when love is written in code, and how much of yourself do you gamble for another chance at being seen?

Shelly Anise downloads Cursed Connections as a dare and gets more than a match. She gets Zynar, a silver-eyed trickster who blossom-frames her living room and rallies a parade of impossible trials. The app’s promise of fate comes with a catch. Each trial forces Shelly to confront the habits that have kept her alone—weaponized honesty, poisoned flattery, enchanted furniture—and to choose whether the risk of being known is worth being cursed.

As corporate overlords close the circuit and a woman named Astoria prepares a system purge, Shelly must learn the rules of a world that obeys nothing but improvisation. With a thirty-day protocol ticking toward a lethal update, she and Zynar have to beat compatibility challenges that read like therapy, survival, and performance art rolled into one. If they fail, Zynar is deleted, the realm is erased, and Shelly loses the only thing that taught her to want again.