I saw that he was working on breaking the code of my signature.
He knew they represented dates. He was looking up birth certificates for May twelfth. Important events. He was narrowing the field.
And he knew that Freedom Overdrive was playing with him. My breadcrumbs weren’t fooling him anymore. He had followed up with Bradfield Financial and knew that it was a dead end. He watched our chat, he went after the leads, and heknew.
He started looking for me again. Searching the IRC chat rooms. He’d find me. He was tenacious. He wouldn’t give up. And he was too damn close.
06:45 Tonight’s the night. All is ready.
06:46 All is ready.
The Virtuant exploit was finally coming to fruition. All of the hard work would pay off. The corrupt CEO and his corporation of lies were going down.
It was the middle of the day. Kyle wasn’t at work again, which was just as well because I wasn’t in the frame of mind to handle his weirdness. He had been avoiding me anyway, which would have bothered me, had I spent time thinking about it.
But my head was full of other things.
My mother had called after meeting Mason, just as I had known she would.
“He’s such a nice man, Hannah. Charlotte likes him too. I hope you bring him to see her again. It did her a lot of good,” Mom had gushed.
“Maybe” was all I had said.
Mom hadn’t liked that answer.
“Don’t ruin something good, Hannah. You do that with all your relationships. It’s like you think you don’t deserve to be happy,” my mother had chided me.
“Don’t try to psychoanalyze me, Mom. I just said maybe I’d bring Mason by. Don’t read anything into it.”
“I know you and I know when you’re creating distance. Don’t do that to Mason. He’s right for you,” Mom had implored.
“And you can tell that from meeting him once?” I had scoffed.
“I can tell by the way you look at him and the way he looks at you,” she had said, and I hated how happy that made me.
He was searching and searching for the real thing. He’d never find it with me.
Never.
I had to shut it down.
Mason had been calling and texting for days. Aside from a few brief texts, I hadn’t responded. I knew it was only a matter of time until he tracked me down. He was relentless in all things. Matters of the heart included.
“I can’t see you tonight, Mason,” I told him when I finally answered his call. I had just gotten home. I had to start preparing for the exploit. But I had to do one more thing first.
Something I should have done weeks ago.
My heart began to break slowly. Painfully.
“Okay, that’s fine. Maybe later in the week.” He was at work. His computer continued to dump information. I could see that he was looking up weekend getaways in the mountains. He was planning. I couldn’t let him do that.
Not anymore.
“No, Mason. Not later in the week.”
I could barely breathe.
I couldn’t do this.
