SOLVED. Adult Sci-Fi with character who builds tiny automatons and woman who can feel history in objects. [s]

[Hannah]

I read the book in 2018 or 2019. It was about a boy (later man) who was very interested in robots/engineering and his friend who was a girl (later woman) who could feel history/past emotions in old objects. I think they lived in japan as children.
SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT

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At one point in their childhood they visited and old place and she freaked out because she could feel all the violence in the past of a knife or sword they touched there. As they become adults they grow away from each other, but eventually meet each other at college again in America. She is popular and involved in history, he is an engineering/robotics type nerd.
I remember one scene where the girl breaks up with her boyfriend because she can feel the history in his clothes and knows he has been cheating on her. I think she generally suppresses her ability because it can be difficult to deal with mentally to know the dark history of so many old items.
He ends up building these tiny robots that work together to perform tasks (automatons). Eventually i think the robots end up taking over the world or something. They have something to do with aliens. There is a scene in the arctic circle and some political conflict around different governments wanting him to use his technology for weaponry. I think his house ends up getting raided at some point.

Thanks for any help finding this book!

[Hannah]

Also it may have been an e-book? I read it on my kindle. Also might've been an e-book borrowed from library.
I also remembered the girl was like the daughter of a diplomat. When they both lived in Japan (or somewhere else in asia?) she lived in this really nice house with walls around it and he lived in an apartment nearby. I think his mom was the housekeeper for the diplomat. The girl might've also spoken french at a young age and she had dolls. The little boy liked to take things, like clocks, apart and put them back together to learn how they worked.

I think they convinced her nanny or maybe his mom to take them on a day trip to a nearby cultural site, which is how the little girl touched the item that gave her intense flashbacks/psychometric understanding of the history of the knife, which had killed a lot of people.

They might've grown apart because her diplomat family was moved to another country.

[Joseph]

This is the Lord of All Things, by Andreas Eschbach.

[Hannah]

Joseph wrote: "This is the Lord of All Things, by Andreas Eschbach."

YES, SOLVED! Thank you!