Vivi Lin has spent two years believing Ethan Vance thinks her life's work is nothing more than a pretty, useless ornament.

She's wrong about almost everything.

When a Category 4 typhoon strands Aether Corp's design and engineering teams on a remote island tech hub, Vivi is forced into five days of inescapable proximity with the coldest, most infuriating man she's ever worked with ? the Chief Backend Architect who publicly rejected her career-defining project in front of the entire company, calling her design's beauty its "fatal flaw."

But behind his icy exterior and militaristic two-meter boundary, Ethan has been quietly, secretly protecting her dream for longer than she could have imagined ? rewriting an entire rendering engine from scratch, on his own time and his own money, just so her fragile, glowing vision could survive contact with the real world.

Trapped together through a flooded server room, a sub-zero vault, and a rooftop clearing after the storm, the walls Ethan spent three years building finally start to come down ? and Vivi discovers that the man she once mocked as a heartless machine has been quietly rewriting his entire life around her, one careful, devoted line of code at a time.

He built systems that never crashed.
She built dreams that refused to be practical.

Neither of them expected the other to be the exception.

You Don't Have to Be Useful is a slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers workplace romance full of storm-locked tension, devoted-genius-hero swoons, and the kind of love that doesn't ask you to earn it.

Contains mature content intended for readers 18+.