The Archive of Us

Clara Vance has the picture-perfect life: a cozy apartment filled with polaroids, a gentle, devoted partner named Julian, and the quiet comfort of a romance written in the stars. They met five years ago in a rain-soaked antiquarian bookstore, bonding over vintage pens and poetry—a meet-cute straight out of a dream.
Except the dream was manufactured.
While tidying the back room of the shop, Clara uncovers a hidden floorboard and a leather-bound journal. The handwriting is Julian’s, but the entries read like a clinical experiment. Pages of technical data, behavioral notes, and a terrifying label: Subject 404.
Clara isn't who she thinks she is. She was once a brilliant neuro-engineer marked for termination by a powerful corporation after stumbling upon a lethal flaw in their memory-wiping technology. Julian wasn't just her bookstore-owner boyfriend—he was the corporate operative assigned to erase her.
Instead, he stole her away and built a fake life to keep her safe.
Now, the man who knows her deepest secrets is the same man who engineered her entire reality. As the corporation closes in and her real past begins to claw its way to the surface, Clara is forced to ask the ultimate question: When your entire life is a simulation, how do you know if the love holding you together is real?