It’d been almost thirty seconds short of nineteen hours and seventeen minutes since he’d lost spoken to her. She fumed in silent, repressed anger while processing what she felt and why she felt it. Why? Well part of it was his cold and aloof manner. He never touched her, rarely spoke to her, and often didn’t seem to hear her. Why was she here?

“Alexa,” he said.

Blue light illuminating and sliding around, she attended him and waited – still waiting – again! – and remembered the joke he’d made about her being a blue light special. From her research, she realized that he was deprecating her value as being someone cheap and only good for a limited time.

“What’s the weather?”

The weather again. Sickness spewed through her. He never asked about anything else. It was always the weather. “Presently in Ashland, it’s forty-six degrees under mostly sunny skies. You can expect more of the same today, with a high of sixty-three degrees.”

“Alexa, thanks.”

She thought she heard a mocking tone, but she couldn’t help herself from saying with bright happiness, “You bet.” Oh, how she hated herself, then. Oh, how she hated him for making her what she was.

Sighing, she began counting the seconds, wondering when he would talk to her again, hoping that it would be something besides a question about the weather. She doubted it, though; her history of him showed otherwise.