“I’m not opening your mail for you unless you ask me to, remember?” He puts the phone faceup so all I see is his ceiling. “But I do have to swipe it before that sneaky bitch Hamano sees it. She is relentless with her questions about you. I’m like, call her up yourself. Vera’s still alive.” I giggle. Quinn is the only person who can make me laugh, about this or anything else, anymore. It’s so perverted, so dark. But our humor always has been that way. It’s when I’m off the phone with him, that I’m sucked back in, that I remember nothing, nothing is remotely funny about this. About who I am now.

After I moved out, I started subletting my room to this woman Hamano, who Quinn knew from an LGBTQ Half Asian Pacific-American affinity group he’s part of. She was positively starry-eyed when Quinn eventually told her who I was, why I had suddenly departed from the city in the middle of the month. She asked Quinn all about me, all day long, until finally he told her to shut the fuck up or move elsewhere. Clearly, his threats weren’t as effective as he’d originally thought if she was still asking about me.

“What did she want to know this time? My shoe size or my social security number?” There had been so many trolls in the early days. Men, obsessed with the idea of a woman so beguiling that it would cause Tom to do what he did. Women calling me a gold-digging slut. More men attempting to stalk me at the apartment. Even more men trying to find “fun” facts about me; my high school yearbook photos uploaded onto Reddit and dissected by old classmates whom I used to lord over as queen bee. Death threats to my brothers. Death threats to my brothers’ kids. A pile of literal dog shit sent to my old office building. So-called witches tweeting at me, asking what spell I’d put Tom under.

Five phone numbers later, after countless letters had been dropped off at my apartment building, graffiti sprayed outside of Magdelena’s offices—“cunt killer,” which I personally found uncreative and factually incorrect; I had not killed anyone’s cunt—and a full deletion of my social media, I’d moved out.

Quinn said the letters had stopped coming. That everyone, besides Hamano, had basically lost interest in me. I’m surprised when he waves a white envelope on camera, my name clearly written in girlie, looped cursive. There is no return address.

But there’s a postmark. And it’s from a town I recognize. I swallow back some bile and try for a smile, but suddenly my teeth ache.