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I shrug. “It’s a dummy website at this point. I mean, it functions—I get inquiries off it sometimes—but I mostly ignore them.”
“Why have you never told me that?”
“If it makes you feel any better, even my own mother thinks I’m in cybersecurity.”
Rage contorts Hannah’s features. “You’re not fucking your mother, Henn.”
In any other situation, that would have been the perfect set-up for a dark, twisted, horribly inappropriate joke. Something like, “At least, not since I met you!” But now isn’t the time for jokes. “I should have sat you down and told you what I do,” I concede. “I was actually going to do that soon, when the timing felt right. But since I’ve never told a girlfriend about this stuff, I guess I didn’t have a good feel for when that should be. I knew I had to do it before we got married, but how soon before that wasn’t clear to me.”
Hannah sighs and plops on the couch. “Just tell me what you do for a living, for fuck’s sake. Tell me who you are.”
I sit next to her. “I’m a hacker for hire. I get hired to hack bad people who deserve to be taken down. I go in, get information that proves their malfeasance, and leave without a trace. I have to be very careful and secretive because, if any of my targets were to find out who I am or what I do, they could come after me or someone I love in retaliation.” I give her a rundown of the sorts of douchebags I regularly take down. Human traffickers, rapists, pedophiles. Cheating husbands who’ve hidden assets. “When I turn over the information to my clients, I get paid a bounty,” I explain. “It’s an honest living. I could steal money, but I don’t. I like earning my money legitimately.” I try to take her hand, but she pulls away. “Please, Hannah, the main thing is that none of this stuff changes who I am or how I feel about you. And it certainly doesn’t change how perfect we are for each other. How compatible. We’re Bert and Ernie—Denver and Stockholm—whether I’m Denver on the side or Denver for a living.”
Hannah’s blue eyes light up. A lightbulb has plainly gone off in her head. “Oh my fucking god. You’ve hacked me, haven’t you?”
Oh, fuck.
“That’s why we’ve always been so freakishly compatible! Because you went in, without a trace, and gathered whatever intel was necessary to make yourself a cheat-sheet on Hannah Milliken!”
Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck. For a half-second there, when I was talking about all the good stuff I do to make the world a better place, I thought I saw forgiveness brewing in Hannah’s deep, blue eyes. But just this fast, I know this confession is going to decimate any chance I might have had of being forgiven tonight . . . or maybe ever.
“Have you hacked me or not?” she demands.
“Yes, I’ve hacked you,” I admit, my heart thundering. “Only once, though. And what I found only confirmed—"
Hannah lurches to standing, looking heartbroken. “No wonder you knew ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul.’ Nobody ever knows that song.”
I stand. “I knew the song through my dad, exactly like I told you. Hannah, I hadn’t even hacked you yet when we had that conversation. I hacked you the next day. And when I did, I quickly discovered hacking you was a pointless exercise because everything I saw only confirmed we’re totally compatible and perfect for each other in every way.”
She scowls. “I never showed you my dream board, did I?”
“No. But that’s a perfect example of what I’m saying. When I saw it, I was like, damn, this girl wants exactly what I want. She’s perfect for me.”
Hannah’s nostrils flare. “That whole dinner in Vegas, I kept thinking, ‘Where did this perfect man who loves the hand-flex in Pride & Prejudice come from? And now I know—”
“No. I genuinely love Pride & Prejudice and the hand-flex. Please, Hannah. Don’t spiral out of control and assume everything I’ve ever said or done—”
She screams, “I’m not the one who’s out of control, Henn. It’s you! You thought you could hack me into falling in love with you. You thought you could control my emotions by gathering data on me.”
“No. Not at all. Well, yes, a tiny bit. At first. But it immediately became clear—"
“That whole first dinner, it felt like you had the Hannah Milliken Spark Notes or something. And you did!”
Panic is spiraling inside me. Why isn’t she listening to me? Why is she jumping to worst-case scenario? “I hadn’t even hacked you at that point. I did it the next day. Do you remember getting an email from your favorite makeup line—fill out a short marketing survey and get a bunch of free stuff? That was me! And you got the email the day after our first dinner together.” The thought occurs, “And by the way, all that stuff I sent you for filling out the survey? It wasn’t cheap!” But thankfully, I know better than to say it out loud.
