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50.

The longing for love is a flawed piece of human coding. It scrambles every circuit in your brain, fries your logic boards, makes it impossible to compute. Seized by our need to be loved, we are unable to see anything clearly, even how we might save our own skin. It’s only much later, with the clarity of distance, that we can see how blind we were. How needy. How desperate.

How stupid.

After I left my mother’s apartment, I began the long walk back home in a daze. The people that I passed on the street gave me pitying looks, quite likely because I was a volcano of woe, bubbling snot and tears from every facial orifice, sobs erupting at unlikely intervals. By the time I got halfway back to the Haight, the sleeve of my sweatshirt was unspeakable.

Spring had snuck in when I was looking the other way, and the evening was windless and comparably balmy. Pedestrians sauntered down the sidewalks with unzipped jackets and naked fingers. For once, the night sky was clear, and I looked up reflexively, hoping for a familiar glimpse of the galaxy; but the city lights had dimmed the sky, and all I could see was Orion, the most pedestrian of constellations. I thought of my father, who had taught me astronomy by having me draw a map of the stars visible above our cabin every night for a year— the way Copernicus did it —so that I could understand the heliocentric movement of the planets.

Thinking of my father set off the waterworks again. In a matter of hours, he would be waiting for me at Starbucks; believing—despite all the ways I’d failed him so far, despite how I’d just been so ready to throw him under the bus to win over my mother—that I was going to show up with his money and the hard drive. I know you’re still one of the good guys, squirrel. Was I? I had less clarity than ever about who the “good guys” actually were.

But at least one of my parents still loved me; wasn’t that better than having no love at all?

A police car blew past me as I was trudging through Hayes Valley, its siren interrupting the night, its lights illuminating the apartment building facades like a demented disco ball. I stepped into the shadowy entranceway of a closed shoe store, a fillip in my heart. But the car raced up the hill without stopping.

As I watched the police vanish in the general direction of my apartment, it suddenly dawned on me that I couldn’t possibly go home. Lionel had turned me in. The FBI would be trying to locate me—I was, after all, one of the targets of the nation’s biggest manhunt—and my sublet would be the first place they’d go. By now they surely had the hard drive and the money that I’d hidden under my bed, along with the incriminating pages of my father’s memoir that I’d painstakingly deciphered (and all the ones I had yet to tackle). I imagined a SWAT team, hidden just behind the door of the apartment, guns drawn and ready to start firing the minute my key hit the lock.

The feds, coming for me, just as my father had always warned they would.

As I stood there outside the shoe store, staring at a display of four-hundred-dollar lug-sole boots—not dissimilar to what I’d always worn in Montana, but ten times the price—I could come up with only three possible choices that remained forme.

I could go back to the apartment anyway, and let myself get arrested, quite possibly in a violent spectacle that would result in my death.

Or: I could do what my mother suggested and turn myself in to the police in the morning, and hope they would be more sympathetic to me because I’d come in on my own accord.

Or: I could go with my father tomorrow, say screw you to San Francisco and the mother who failed to live up to my hopes and the industry that I’d let myself believe in despite everything I’d been taught. I could become the herald of change, railing against inevitability, leaving destruction in my wake. A murderer, a criminal, yes, but at least one who was beloved by her father.

Option A felt impossible. Options B and C at least gave me more time to decide, but I would need to find a place to spend the night while I did.

I thought of the bunk beds at Signal—could I hunker down there for the night?—but if the feds were at my apartment, they were surely also swarming all over my place of employment. For that matter, I technically didn’t even have a job anymore, based on what Marcie from HR had told me. Even if my employers at Signal weren’t yet aware that I was a fugitive, they still believed that I was an identity thief. My key card had probably been disabled the minute I walked out the door.

Maybe I could stay in a hotel? I tugged the fold of money out of my pocket and counted: twenty-six dollars, not enough for even the sketchiest Tenderloin motel.

I was debating whether I was tough enough to try to make a go of sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park—my father had taught me how to build a pine-bough lean-to, but it had been years since I’d attempted one—when I heard a familiar voice behindme.

“Esme?”

I pivoted where I stood, coiling like a cat, ready to leap away. Brianna was approaching from down Hayes Street, carrying a greasy paper bag. If she’d learned who I was in the hours since I’d walked out the door of our office, it wasn’t evident on her face. In fact, she was smiling, as if happy to run intome.

She stopped in front of me. “Hi! You look like crap. Still sick?”

I glanced in the plate glass window of the shoe store, trying to compose myself. I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about, and then I remembered the hasty excuse I’d given her when I ran out the door of Signal that morning. (Had it only been nine hours earlier?) “Oh. No. I’m feeling better.”

“We wondered if maybe you had the stomach flu. It’s going around.” She reached into the paper bag, which smelled suspiciously like burrito, and withdrew a tortilla chip. She tossed it in her mouth, then passed the bag to me. “Chip? They always give you too many and then I eat them all and feel ill.”

I shook my head. The smell made me queasy, my mother’s chicken sitting uneasily in my stomach. “I’m not hungry.”

She popped another chip in her mouth. “You picked a bad day to leave early, huh? So nuts.”

Her blasé demeanor perplexed me. Clearly, she hadn’t yet been informed who I was. Was it possible that Lionel’s conversation with the FBI hadn’t immediately turned the office upside down? But wouldn’t the feds have marched straight over to my desk, looking for me? Maybe they were keeping everything under wraps until they investigated Lionel’s claims. Or maybe they hadn’t believed him?

“What was nuts?” I finally managed.

“You don’t know? Oh shit, I don’t know how you would, come to think of it. You don’t even have a cellphone so I couldn’t call you. You should really get one, you know. Join the twenty-first century, get one of those new Nokias.”

I was about to lose my cool completely. “Brianna, what happened ?”

She leaned in, so close I could smell the chips on her breath. “Check this out: Lionel turned himself in.”

“Turned himself in?” My insides collapsed. Her words weren’t making any sense. She meant me, Lionel had turned me in, right? But she’d said himself.

“For what?” I managed.

“For deleting the Luddite Manifesto, remember?”

Now I was really confused. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know, right? Janus and I were shocked. But it’s really not that surprising when you think about it. Lionel was really worked up about that website. I mean, we all were, of course. All the attention that psychopath was getting for his paranoid fearmongering. And the feds just left it sitting there online for anyone to read, God knows why.” She was squeezing the paper sack in her fist, mangling the top. “But I guess Lionel decided to do something about it. Apparently, he confessed to hacking into the GeoCities server and deleting it.”

I put out a hand and pressed it against the cool glass of the shop window, afraid that if I didn’t, I might fall down. “Oh my God.”

“Honestly, I can’t believe he told them.” Brianna was still talking, unaware that I was on the verge of fainting. “I mean, would they ever have figured it out? And now he’s in a world of trouble. Hacking—yes, I know everyone does it these days, but it’s still a federal offense. Plus GeoCities is going to be pissed . And it sounds like the FBI considered that website evidence for the case they’re building against the Bombastard. Whenever they catch him. So yeah, everyone is mad. Not such a smart move, Lionel.”

Now I felt genuinely sick to my stomach. “What’s going to happen to him?”

She extracted one more tortilla chip from the bag and nibbled at the edge like a distracted chipmunk. “We think he was arrested. The two FBI agents who came in—they didn’t cuff him or anything, but he was marched out of the office between them. Perp-walk style. I sure hope he has a good lawyer.”

“Poor Lionel,” I whispered. I imagined him sitting on a metal shelf in a jail cell, his tie askew and glasses smudged, surrounded by drug addicts and murderers and domestic abusers. I couldn’t understand why he lied. But the answer was obvious, wasn’t it? He did it for me. For me, who didn’t even deserve it . I wanted to cry. “We have to help him . He’s not even a hacker!”

Brianna folded the bag closed and was gazing down at it with an expression of faint revulsion. “Not much we can do, I don’t think. Look, Esme, don’t take this the wrong way, but—please don’t mess with Lionel’s head anymore. I don’t know exactly what happened between the two of you, but you clearly did something to upset him. He’s not been himself lately and I have to wonder if this stunt is somehow related. Lionel…he’s vulnerable. He needs stability, OK?”

“I’ll stay away from him,” I promised.

She rolled her eyes. “That’s not really what I meant.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, then, but it seemed like a moot point anyway. He was in jail, for something I’d done. And no matter what I decided to do tomorrow, nothing was ever going to go back to the status quo betweenus.

“Not trying to be rude but I taped last night’s Buffy and I really want to get home to watch it. See you at work tomorrow?”

Unlikely, I thought. You’ll probably never see me again, except on the ten o’clock news. I was about to continue in the opposite direction when something caused me to pivot. “Brianna, can I stay with you tonight? I got locked out of my apartment.”

She hesitated, then shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “As long as you don’t mind Buffy .”

—

And so the final night of my sojourn in San Francisco was spent on Brianna’s corduroy couch, watching a blond cheerleader vanquish vampires with a sharpened stake.

After Brianna finally yawned and excused herself, I lay sleepless on that couch for hours. This last night in the city felt like a parallel to my first few nights here: equally homeless, equally guilt-ridden, equally lost. And yet it was so much worse this time around, because the person who was suffering the most because of me right now was the one person who had done the least to deserveit.

I regretted ever going to look for Lionel in that chat room, regretted even more that he’d offered to help me. I wanted to wish myself back to the previous November, before the internet arrived at our cabin, before I found the photo of my mother, before my life slid sideways. Back to the recliner on our porch and the mist drifting across the rain-kissed meadow, to Samson skulking by the pond and the smell of pine needles on the crisp forest air. Back to when I had my books and my father, and that was all I thought I needed.

Now that I knew how much else there was to need, I couldn’t help wanting it all.

But there was never any going back.

I rose when the sun was just starting to tint the sky pink. I left a note on the kitchen table— Thank you, for everything —and let myself out without saying goodbye. I made my way back to the Haight, bought a cup of coffee, and then sat on the stoop of the apartment building across from mine, watching and waiting.

The city was waking up. Arriving shop owners threw open their gates and roused the junkies that lay asleep on their steps. Buses grumbled past, weighed down with bleary commuters. The smell of blueberry muffins from the diner down the street lingered in the air, with a whiff of stale garbage just below.

There was no sign of a police presence at my apartment. Still, I didn’t move until one of the Heathers finally materialized in the entrance of the building around 7:00 a.m . I ran across to intercept her, holding the door open as she tussled with her bike helmet.

“Good morning,” I said.

“You’re up early.” She stood aside to let mein.

I hovered at the door, reluctant to go upstairs. “Just checking—is everything OK up there?”

She gave me a funny look. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

So it was true. Lionel really hadn’t turned me in, not even after his own arrest. The feds hadn’t come by. I was still free, even if it didn’t particularly feel that way.

I trudged up the stairs for the last time, the ancient carpet soft under my sneakers. Inside the apartment, I collected the duffel bag from where I’d stuffed it under the bed, still half full of cash, the hard drive bulging through the nylon fabric. I stacked my father’s pages on top, along with my own half-finished transcriptions. Everything else I possessed went back into the backpack, where it had started two months earlier.

I took one last look around Megan’s bedroom—at the eyelet coverlet and the college diplomas framed on the wall, the giant television and the photographs of friends I would never meet. This room wasn’t mine; it never had been. Nothing actually belonged to me in San Francisco—not my job, not my friends, not even my name. I had spent two months as a trespasser, living a stranger’s life, based on a scaffold of lies. I could finally see it now.

I just wish I knew the way back to me, whoever I was.

I shouldered the backpack and the duffel bag and headed out.