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would be an ever-present mental sore reminding me of what I can’t do.
    Before lunch, I called my real estate agent. The house was sold before I’d even made the first mortgage payment. I’ve been in this condo since.
    A burst of shame leaves my face burning. What do the neighbors think? These aren’t whimpers in the night. I scream loud. The last thing I want is to explain my nightmares to anyone, but why doesn’t anyone ever ask if I’m okay?

CHAPTER 4
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    F RIDAY MORNING , Thomas calls to make dinner plans and ask if he can stay the night. We decide on Japanese food and I agree he can stay over.
    A few years ago, I had several disastrous attempts at dating at Emily’s insistence, events which inevitably aborted early after panic attacks. Thomas was different. He never pushed, never made a move that surprised or threatened me. He was simply there. He made me laugh even though my teeth were gritted in fear. We’ve gradually inched closer together, and now, two years later, part of me yearns to marry him.
    No matter how badly I’ve suffered, the need to be hugged and loved never goes away. That he can manage to fit himself into my jigsaw puzzle of mental issues and myriad oddities makes him all the more precious.
    It’s impossible for us to become closer, let alone get married. I can’t ever explain what I’ve done. What I continue to do. There are people out there ruining other people’s lives. I must stop them.
    How would I account for the long road trips? The strange outings in the middle of the night. The weird computer hardware. My secret office.
    He has to stay where he is, a carefully controlled distance away. This tears at me. There must be limits to his patience, and I dread crossing that unknown line and losing him.
    *     *     *
    We travel to Alberta Street in northeast Portland. I let Thomas drive. He bought a new Audi this week, and his grin is as wide as his face.
    I sit in the passenger seat and take long, slow breaths. Even the slight loss of control of being the passenger brings on anxiety. I’ll cope for his sake.
    At the restaurant, a hip new place, we split a small bottle of sake and order omakase, chef’s choice. After I finish my first thimble of sake, the rage at PrivacyGuard resurfaces.
    “Do you understand? That they’re actually making privacy worse, by hiding the data from the owners, while it’s still out there for anyone with the know-how to download an alternate browser?”
    “I get it,” Thomas says, a slight smile crossing his face. “The question is, what are you going to do about it?”
    “Me?”
    “Yeah, you.”
    “I’m only an engineer. I can’t stop this.” Thomas runs his own company, a law practice specializing in intellectual property. He’s forgotten how hard it is when you’re not totally in charge, when it takes months of lobbying to affect even a small change, the way big organizations build up the momentum of bad ideas until they’re impossible to stop and no one even remembers where the concept came from.
    “You’re their data goddess. They idolize your every word.”
    “No, they humor my every word, because I single-handedly improved ad targeting enough to increase company revenue 12 percent.”
    He glances at my stump.
    “Yeah, I do everything single-handedly.”
    “Can you talk to your boss?”
    “Daniel?” I don’t bother to hide my snicker. “He has no backbone. He’ll kowtow to Carl all day long.”
    “Then go to Carl.”
    “Carl cares about the bottom line. He sees a way to boost revenue per user.” Thomas doesn’t even know I was once Tomo’s chief database architect, that I reported to our CTO. I set the ground rule early on that I would never talk about the past, and he would never ask about it. Why don’t I go back to the CTO? I’m hesitant, and I wonder whether he sent me off to Portland to protect me or because he was embarrassed by me.
    “Give him a better way,” Thomas says, grabbing a skewer of meat off