My skin crawled at the idea of a stranger electronically invading my home, riffling through my personal files, and watching me while I thought I was alone. And then for that stranger to be sharing my secrets on a forum filled with like-minded creeps? Petrifying. When I read that many victims involuntarily downloaded the RAT software while torrenting, I relaxed—I never use torrent sites—but I relaxed only slightly. After all, I had recently listened to an episode of the podcast Reply All titled “What Kind of Idiot Gets Phished?”—which made it abundantly clear that idiots are not the only ones getting phished. As that podcast proved, a minimally proficient phisher can quickly and easily gain access to your email—even with two-factor identification enabled—so who knows what else they could do?

I was so deeply unsettled by the thought of an anonymous ratter lurking around my computer that I did two things: first I covered my laptop’s built-in webcam with a sticker, as Mark Zuckerberg and James Comey both reportedly do, and then I began writing this story.

I. Ars Technica, March 10, 2013, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/rat-breeders-meet-the-men-who-spy-on-women-through-their-webcams.

PROLOGUE HIM

Everyone on the internet is a liar. Every last one of us. The difference is the magnitude of our lies. On one end of the spectrum are the scammers, the phishers, the lowlifes trying to convince your grandmother to bail you out of a fictional Thai prison. On the other end are those whose untruths are the smallest, the most inconsequential: those who click a box affirming they’ve read terms and conditions, who click “like” on a cousin’s photograph of her pug-nosed child. In the middle are the rest of us: those who tell slightly bolder lies designed to make ourselves look better. We embellish our job descriptions. We smile in pictures even when our hearts feel shriveled and black. Because what’s the harm in making our mediocre lives look and feel just a little less mediocre?

But the internet can reveal just as much as it can obfuscate.

Take Sabrina, for example. When I was sixteen, she was my whole world, my pocket-sized, red-haired princess. Every thump of my beating heart was an echo of her name. With her small hand in mine, I could do anything. But seven months into our relationship, her family moved across the country to California. Part of me wanted to drink bleach and die, and another part of me was certain Sabrina and I were simply enduring a test to prove our everlasting love and that fifty years later we would laugh about those years apart. The day she left, I found two strands of her strawberry-blonde hair on my pillow, and I placed them in an envelope beside my bed for safekeeping.

At first, we talked for hours on the phone each night. I twisted those hairs around my finger and listened to Sabrina say how much she hated California and how much she missed me. She promised she still loved me. She promised nothing would change. She promised. But her calls gradually became less and less frequent. She started taking an hour, and then two or three, to respond to text messages. I assumed she felt as gutted as I did, so I mailed her gifts and flowers to cheer her up, sent her poems all but written in blood squeezed from my aching heart.