David had known both Ethan and me for years. He was the kind of man who could fix a router with a paper clip, despised vague language, and once rebuilt my entire home office network after Ethan spilled beer into the modem and then suggested maybe the house wiring “just sucked.” He was also deeply unimpressed by charm, which meant Ethan had never quite known what to do with him.
He answered on the second ring. “Hey, Clara. You okay? I’ve been seeing things.”
“They’re everywhere,” I said, and heard my own voice shake. “He’s turning people against me. I don’t even know where to start.”
“You start,” David said, “by not panicking. Then you start by fighting back. I think I know how.”
By evening he was at my kitchen table with a glowing laptop open, glasses sliding halfway down his nose, fingers moving over the keyboard so fast they seemed to blur. He muttered to himself while he worked, half detective, half irritated engineer.
“Ethan thinks he’s clever,” he said. “But he’s careless. Always has been. He uses the same variations on passwords, stores recovery codes in stupid places, and never clears synced devices because he assumes nobody else is paying attention.”