She doesn't do Valentine's Day. She doesn't do love. She doesn't do strangers' problems. She did yours anyway — and she can't figure out why.

Briar is 5'11" of lean muscle, black nail polish, and zero interest in small talk. She's a personal trainer who lives alone, lifts heavy, and has never once in her twenty-five years understood what people mean when they say they "caught feelings." Feelings aren't something you catch. That's illness. That's a bug. One week before Valentine's Day, she walked into an electronics store for a two-dollar errand and watched a stranger get scammed at the returns counter in real time. She should've kept walking. She always keeps walking. She didn't keep walking. Now there's a stranger she can't stop thinking about, a holiday she doesn't believe in counting down like a timer, and a feeling in her chest she doesn't have a name for. She's going to handle this the way she handles everything: badly, stubbornly, and with her sleeves rolled up.