Heart-Shaped Hack(68)
“You didn’t know his last name?” Diane asked.
She shook her head. “Not right away.” Kate went back to the beginning and told her mom about the donations and how Ian had tracked her to the café by hacking her credit card account. “And then he told me he’d stolen the money he’d donated but thought we could still be friends. I told him I didn’t think so.”
Diane’s shocked expression conveyed how alarming she found this revelation.
Kate took another sip of her wine. It wasn’t as effective as the pills, but it calmed her a little. “He’d stolen it from cyberthieves who shouldn’t have had it in the first place, like some kind of modern day Robin Hood. It was his version of vigilante justice.” Kate explained the cause of Ian’s dad’s suicide, and the reasoning behind Ian’s actions.
Diane took a rather large drink of her wine. Under any other circumstances, Kate knew her mother would have had plenty to say about Ian. But Kate’s grief was too raw, and she wouldn’t have been able to handle hearing anyone say one negative thing about him. Diane kept her thoughts to herself.
“Not only had he hacked my credit card account, he’d hacked my personal computer. That’s why I said I didn’t like him at first. He was just so cocky and arrogant, and he had no concept of boundaries. But he was charming as hell, and he went to work on winning me over right away.”
“But what about the money he stole?”
“I no longer cared about that. Ian never once made excuses for it. He’d look you in the eye and tell you he was a thief. Said it wasn’t an ethical struggle for him at all. By then I knew he was a good person, and I knew he would never treat me badly. And he didn’t. I fell in love with him so hard, and I never saw it coming.”
Kate took another drink of her wine. Her mother had been right. It did feel good to talk about Ian.
“He didn’t tell me right away, but in addition to his regular clients, he also did some hacking for the government, working with the FBI to fight cybercrime. That’s why he protected his identity so carefully. He didn’t want the hackers he was trying to catch to know who he was or where he lived. He moved around a lot so they wouldn’t find him. He was getting ready to leave Minneapolis, and I was going to go with him. To Charlotte, North Carolina.”
“You were going to move?” Diane said. “What about the food pantry?”
“I was going to resign. I loved Ian and I wanted to be with him.” Kate started crying again.
Diane kissed Kate’s temple and smoothed her hair the way she had when Kate was a little girl.
“He was the one I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with. When people talk about a once-in-a-lifetime love, I thought I knew what they meant. But I didn’t. Ian was the man I didn’t know I needed until I met him. The whole time I was with Stuart, Ian was out there, waiting. And we found each other, but then I lost him.”
“I promise you’ll get through this.”
Kate wiped her eyes. “Right now I’d settle for not feeling quite so much pain.”
“It’s going to take time,” Diane said gently.
Her mother spoke the truth. It’s what Kate would have said to anyone who had suffered a similar loss. “I think I’ll go to bed,” Kate said. “I don’t want any more of my wine.”
She kissed her mother and then went into the bedroom and lay down on Ian’s side of the bed, clutching her phone and listening to his voice mail message as she cried herself to sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Diane went home a week after Ian died. Kate had convinced her mother she’d be okay on her own, not that she actually believed it. But she couldn’t keep using her mother as a buffer, a crutch. It was time to see if she would sink or swim.
“I can come back in a few weeks,” Diane said.
“We’ll see,” Kate said. “I love you, Mom. Thank you so much for being there for me.”
After Diane left, Kate continued with the routine Diane had set for her: sleep, shower, dress, try to eat. Now she added work, and walking through the door of the food pantry on her first day back was the most difficult thing she’d had to do since losing Ian.
She owed it to her clients not to look like she was at death’s door and to try to function like a real human. But her eyes were constantly swollen and red-rimmed, surrounded by dark circles. She kept a bottle of eyedrops in her desk drawer, and she stopped wearing eye makeup. Her complexion, normally so healthy and bright, looked dull and ashen. Styling her hair in anything other than a ponytail seemed like a waste of time. Acting as if nothing was wrong took a monumental amount of energy, and she felt physically drained by the end of the day, a brittle shell of her former self.
Her smiles were forced and she could only maintain them for so long, but she tried her best, especially for new clients. She didn’t want them to think there was something wrong with her although many probably wondered if there was. When Samantha came in with the kids, Kate held Georgie on her lap and tried not to cry. Only Helena knew what had happened to Ian, and she treated Kate like one of her own daughters, fussing over her, hugging her, doing whatever she could to help.
Two weeks after Ian died, Kate was having a particularly hard day and had been hiding out in the back room so no one would see her cry. That morning, she’d found a note Ian had once left for her and that she’d shoved into a drawer in the kitchen and forgotten about. But then her smoke alarm had started to chirp while she was getting ready for work—the relentless, grating noise almost sending Kate over the edge—and the note was in the drawer where she kept the batteries.