Ware

meticulous man who believed in the elegant purity of code. His last gift to me was his old, beat-up laptop and a single piece of adv

al. Every freelance project, every hour worked at the diner, every dollar earned and every penny spent-it was all logged in his app. I had f

t of love and remembrance was now my only weapon. It

x. I pushed aside the stacks of paper and pulled out the old laptop. It was heav

plastic chair in the corner, I powered on the machine. The screen flickered to life, and I click

," he' d said. "Think of it like a digital stone tablet. Every time you make an entry, it gets carved into the stone, given a unique time-stamp, and a copy of that ca

choed in the desolate

Five years of my life, displayed in

25

elance design work, tim

urs of waitre

osited from thre

rred to pay off Jo

ility payment, every cheap p

aying." They could freeze my accounts, they could tear up a contract, they could take my son. But they couldn't e

en extinguished began t

laptop. I exported every last byte of data-the logs, the

t list on my phone. My thumb hovered over a

membered him at the funeral, barely twenty-five, promising me that if I ever needed anything, anything at all, he would be the

pressed the call button. It rang thre

amb

isper. "It' s... it' s Diana. Dia

is voice vanished, replaced by sharp recognition. "Diana.

nothing is okay. I' m in... I' m in a lot of troub

vement on the other end

wake and infused with a steely confidence that sent a flicker

d legal pads. Eric Gamble was no longer the lanky kid I remembered. He was a man, with s

the emotional devastation. I simply p

I said, my voice flat and cold.

life cascaded onto the screen in a waterfa

ed. His fingers drummed on the desk, faster and faster. A slow, predatory smile began to s

rrifying, exhilarating light. He looked at me, real

g from you based on their story. Now, we use your story to take everything

cold, rejecting eyes. I thought of the fifty-thousand-dollar severance check

the white-hot rage, coalesced into a

y own eyes cold a

ropping like a shard of ice. "I want them