Officially Someone Else

Ben Lawson has spent thirty-five years perfecting the art of being no one in particular, and he is proud of it.

Then the barista starts calling him by a drink he'd never order, a stranger thanks him for a keynote he never gave, and his own bank congratulates him on being confident, magnetic, and loud. Somewhere in the plumbing of America, a clerical error has decided Ben is actually someone bold. Her name is Sophia Bennett, and they've never met.

Sophia is being quietly demoted into Ben. Hardware stores hand her contractor discounts. A woodworking guild begs her to judge their competition. Her whole reputation keeps arriving at his door, and his keeps landing on hers, one perfectly reasonable algorithmic decision at a time.

When they finally track each other down, they don't fall for each other because they're opposites. They fall because they're the only two people left who see each other clearly, while the entire world insists it knows them better.

Fixing the records was never the hard part. The hard part is deciding whether they want to go back to who they were before the mistake gave them permission to become who they always could've been.

For readers who suspect no algorithm has ever actually understood them, and who want to laugh out loud on one page and get a lump in their throat on the next.