The 94%

There’s a statistic in Chapter One of What He’d Burn. Ninety-four percent satisfaction rate among confirmed fated mate pairs.

It sounds like proof that the system works. But when a bond chemically suppresses your ability to want anything else, you’re not measuring happiness. You’re measuring compliance. Of course the numbers look good. That’s a rigged survey. The 94% is the number equivalent of “but he’s so good to you.”

It also does something else. It makes you think the bad outcome is for someone else. It makes the 6% theoretical. The same way a medical system dismisses patients who don’t fall into their statistics as outliers instead of people. And then you’re in the 6% and nobody’s asking the right questions because the problem must be you.

Anna asks the right questions. She’s brilliant and driven. Not only is she a scientist, but she has resonance sensitivity. She can feel molecular patterns in living tissue, diagnose what’s wrong with a body at the cellular level. She can see the bond operating on her. She can name it: progressive suppression of independent cognitive function. That’s the clinical term. Sounds less romantic than destiny.

She still can’t stop it.

That gap, between seeing the pattern and being trapped inside it anyway, is codependence with a magical mechanism. The bond magnifies Anna’s empathy until it becomes a cage. Women live in that cage without the magic. The pressure to be soft, to understand, to placate, to absorb someone else’s emotions until you can’t find your own underneath. The expectation that our empathy is a resource for everyone else to use. Then, Jacob’s magnification links to something women have been subject to forever: the control men need to wield in order to feel secure in their place in the world.

Fuck the patriarchy.

Speaking of shit men, my mother wound is ripped open in this book for the world to poke around in. I wrote Anna’s mother as a woman who spent her whole life chasing the elusive fated mate bond, which she never found. The cosmic lottery, people call it. She left Anna alone for days at a time while she searched. My mother made her version of that choice. Multiple mothers and stepmothers in my life who, when forced to choose between themselves and a relationship, between their children and a partner, chose the partner. Every time.

So I wrote a woman who refuses. Who looks at destiny and says: I don’t care what you think, I get to decide.

The 94% is the promise the fairy tales about fated mates make. What He’d Burn is what happens when the edge case occurs.