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54.

Lionel called me a few days ago.

“Have you been following the news?” he asked. In the background, I could hear dishes clattering in a sink, the whine of a toddler, a whirring blender, the sounds of a household starting its day.

“Not only did I see it, some journalist found me out and showed up on my doorstep looking for an interview about my dad,” I said. I was standing at my easel, paint in my hair, squinting at the figure I’d just daubed on my canvas. It was all wrong; I would have to start again.

“Shit, really? Are you doing OK?”

“I’m fine, honestly.” I wiped my paintbrush on my smock and tucked the cellphone under my ear. On the other side of my living room window, the squirrels had somehow clambered up to the bird feeder again, and were making quick work of the seeds my daughter had put out. Squirrels, I have learned, are exceptionally clever rodents, adept at the art of misdirection, resourceful survivors; I couldn’t begrudge them their treat, even if it meant that the finches would bypass my house this spring.

Lionel set my father’s name as a Google Alert years ago, and he still called me whenever something worrisome popped up. For a long time, during the aughts, there hadn’t been much for Lionel to call me about. But in recent years, as what was once science fiction has increasingly become reality—AI writing movies, robots delivering groceries, wars conducted primarily by drone, entire career paths wiped out by technological advances—Lionel had been calling me more and more. My father, after living invisibly in his jail cell for decades, just a curious footnote of history, had somehow become part of the zeitgeist. People were once again paying attention to what he’d been warning us about.

I was seeing the same things that Lionel was, the stories that had evidently set Yasmin the journalist on her path to finding me. A news story about how The Luddite Manifesto was being taught in college curricula; a Fox News political commentator who’d praised my father on air; an investigative newspaper series about a radical anti-technology movement that called themselves “the Adamites.”

This latest story—the one Lionel was calling me about—had made the front page of The New York Times . A tech billionaire and self-styled maverick had gone on social media and pronounced my father a “prescient genius” who’d “said what no one else wanted to say.” His post had triggered sales of the book version of The Luddite Manifesto (published by an unscrupulous press that had snatched up the rights when the government auctioned them off two decades earlier) and launched it to the top of the Amazon bestseller charts. I would have found this laughably ironic—my father embraced by the very people he would have murdered, if given the chance—if it didn’t make me ill to think of him sitting in his jail cell, smug in his vindication.

I knew this was coming, of course. I saw it even during the very first days of the trial, with the handful of protestors that sat outside the courtroom every day, cardboard signs hoisted above their baseball caps. THE BOMBASTER IS A PROPHET. LISTEN TO ADAM. TECHNOLOGY = DOOM. Rhona said they were loonies, and told me to ignore them; but every time I climbed the stairs to the courthouse, past this phalanx of sour-breathed acolytes screaming their epithets at me— Jezebel! Traitor! He should have blown you up! —I felt a chill in my heart. That they were a harbinger of something to come.

“It’s just a matter of time now,” I said to Lionel gloomily.

“Don’t be so pessimistic,” he said.

“You know I’m right.” And he knew exactly what I meant—we’d talked about this so many times over the years. A conversation we’d had over a bottle of bourbon during the dark days after my father’s trial; or during late-night long-distance phone calls when I finally went off to college (art school, not engineering, in the end), or postcoital chats on those occasions when we’d fallen back into bed with each other despite knowing better. Huddled together, whispering about my fears: not that my father’s dire predictions would prove correct, but that the wrong people would start to see him as a legitimate theorist rather than a terrorist. That, eventually, some follower would decide to take up his mantle, and start building bombs of their own.

It hasn’t happened yet. I’m sure it will.

—

What does my father think of his renewed infamy? I can guess, but I don’t actually know firsthand. I haven’t spoken to him directly since that day at Starbucks. The last time we were in the same room together was the long week when I testified at his trial, while he watched me from across the courtroom with his forehead knitted together in disbelief. As if I had inexplicably changed the ending of a story that he was pretty sure he’d written himself.

I decided to stay home on the day the verdict was handed down. I unplugged the phone and turned off the television and cried until I was as empty as a cracked egg. It wasn’t until I passed a newsstand the next morning that I learned that my father had been given a life sentence, not a death sentence, but without the option of parole.

After a while, I began receiving letters from the prison where my father was serving his time—letters addressed to Jane Williams, always, which caused the mailman no shortage of confusion. I gave these letters to Lionel, unopened, and told him to hang on to them for me in case I ever changed my mind and decided to read them. By the time we got drunk together one evening and threw them in the fireplace, I had at least four dozen.

Eventually the letters stopped coming. I was never sure if that was because my father gave up writing them, or if he could no longer figure out how to get in touch withme.

I’ve made myself very hard to find.

—

I suppose you’re wondering why Lionel and I didn’t end up together. There are always a thousand reasons why any particular relationship fails—a chain of decisions and miscommunications, impossible to disentangle—but I can probably distill ours down to youth. We were just babies when we loved each other; and each had our own issues to work through before we could find happiness inside a relationship. I hit my twenties and—finally having the freedom to experience life to its fullest—went a little wild; meanwhile, he struggled with finding ways to manage his depression. On top of this, the weight of our complicated history together kept undermining our best intentions. Damage is hard to undo once it’s done. And so we broke up, got back together, broke up again. Eventually I went off to art school, was impregnated by a photographer classmate, married him, had our child, became a graphic designer, got divorced.

Along the way, I lost Lionel as a lover. Don’t be disappointed by this, though—I’m not. Because I never lost him as a friend, and maybe that was more important, anyway. We still chose each other to be members of the families that we needed, as opposed to the families we were born with.

It is no small thing to have the ability to make that choice; in fact, it’s probably the most important decision we get to make in life. Which is why I make it, time and time again. I’ve carefully built my own community over the years, because if there’s one clear lesson that I learned from my hermitic childhood, it’s that you need lots of people around you if you’re ever going to find your true self. Listening to one voice, and one voice only, doesn’t make you a human being. It makes you a parrot.

…Or so I remind myself when my own daughter, now a teenager, pretends that she can’t hear a word I say.

—

Other than my relationship with Lionel, I lost everything that I had that winter in San Francisco. My name, obviously; and my job; and my father. My mother, too—although maybe you could argue that she decided to lose me. Because while she did end up paying Rhona’s astronomical legal bills, she never followed up on the other part of her promise that night: When all this is over, and everything has been sorted out by the legal system, I’m sure we can reconnect and start over. I spoke to her only once after that abysmal dinner: the following morning, when I called her from a pay phone and asked for her lawyer’s contact information. She read me the number, and then hung up before I could even thank her.

Maybe it was hypocritical of me to use my mother’s lawyer and take her money. I debated doing neither. But in the end I decided to behave like my namesake, the squirrel, and be pragmatic about my own survival.

Sometimes I wonder if my mother would truly have reached out, after the trial was over and I was vindicated in the eyes of the press. A sympathetic profile of me, written by Janus and published in Signal on the eve of my testimony—the only interview I would ever agree to sit for—had changed the tenor of the coverage. Sentiment tilted in my favor after that; maybe my mother would ultimately have decided that she wanted me as her daughter, after all, and claimed me as her own.

Except that, in the interview, I chose not to keep my mouth shut about her, and so that was the end of that.

…Perhaps the strangest part of this saga—in a saga with so many, many bizarre twists—is the role of Tess Trevante. The iconic technologist has refused to speak about her role in these events and has not formally acknowledged her daughter’s existence. Her only public comment about the situation came in the form of a statement that she released to the press in the days immediately after Adam Nowak’s identity was revealed by CNN. “I was Adam Nowak’s first victim, and might have been his last, too, had he not been caught. But beyond this, I have no relationship with these heinous and wrongheaded crimes. Indeed, right up until the perpetrators were finally identified, I believed that my former family was dead. It was quite a shock to discover they were the subject of a nationwide manhunt.”

Is this true? Esme Nowak is cagey about what, exactly, happened when she revealed herself to her mother for the first time, reportedly just days before turning her father in to the police. On the subject of Tess Trevante, she will say only this: “I went to my mother and asked for her help. Instead, she chose to help herself. I think that tells you everything that you need to know about her. It certainly told me.”

I wonder sometimes what my mother is really like—if there was in fact some more flattering “essential truth” (as Lionel put it) that I would have discovered if I’d actually gotten to know her. Maybe my father’s memoirs were an accurate portrait of her—a self-centered woman who’d never wanted a child, until the child became a useful tool; or maybe she was just a human being, flawed in the same ways we all are, who simply wasn’t emotionally equipped to handle the stranger who showed up at her door with a backpack stuffed with trouble. Regardless, neither version of her was the mother that I had been searching for. And so, given the unusual ability to choose whether or not I wanted a mother like that, I chose to live without one at all.

I’d be lying if I said that there weren’t still moments when I regret this.

—

Can you ever escape legacy? Does it define you, whether you like it or not? Even if you consciously flee it, doesn’t it still circumscribe the shape of who you are, or are not?

I’ve spent my life trying to walk the middle ground, to be neither my mother nor my father but someone who is wholly myself . But judging by how much I still have to say about the subject—by the fact that, decades on, I’m writing these pages, still seeking some kind of clarity—it’s evident that I haven’t really escaped either of them. Their shadows loom over my every decision: whether I choose to pick up my smartphone first thing when I wake up, or whether I choose to go for a walk instead. The fact that my daughter and I live on fifteen acres of wooded land in Marin, the fact that I write regular checks to the Audubon Society, the fact that I shun social media entirely—you could draw a line from these decisions straight back to my Luddite father. And yet, the pile of Amazon boxes collecting on my porch are a sign that I am not so very far from my mother, either. She would also surely approve of the electric car my daughter uses to drive herself to school, and the Apple Pencil that I find so critical for my graphic design work, and all the other technology tools that make my life so much easier that I sometimes close my eyes to how they are also making our world harder.

Do I feel guilty about this? Maybe not as much as I should. But if there’s one thing I understand at this point, it’s that life isn’t always a series of binary choices. Sometimes it’s not about either/or but about learning how to manage the complexities of both/and .

I’m sometimes asked, by the handful of people who know who I really am, whether I share my father’s pessimistic outlook about what lies in store for us; or whether I agree with my mother that humankind’s progress is a one-way trajectory, an arrow going forever up. But I have no answer. I’m not a prophet. I have no crystal ball. But if forced to respond, I think I would say this: that I believe that civilization’s path is a pendulum that swings both ways, vacillating between hope and despair, success and failure, and all we can do is hang on for dear life. Because it will never, ever stop.

And so I look toward the future with open eyes, readying myself for whatever comes next. Not Jane, no longer Esme; justme.