Susan read the sentence on her screen, bile rising in her throat. Seven words. They made her go cold all the way to the bone.

Hello, pigeon. Did Archie like his birthday present?

Susan leapt up and backed away from the bed like she’d been burned. Her heart was pounding in her ears. Pigeon. Gretchen had been the only person who’d ever called Susan that. Susan glanced around frantically. Gretchen had been here—in Susan’s bedroom. She’d typed that sentence on Susan’s computer. Susan forced herself to turn, openmouthed and terrified, inspecting every shadow. But she was alone. Her darting eyes confirmed it. The closet was open and empty. There was no room for anyone to hide under the futon.

Gretchen wasn’t in her room. Dread gripped Susan by the stomach as her eyes turned to her laptop. Gretchen was in her computer.

Susan stared at the laptop. She could see the patches at the bottom of the keyboard where her palms had worn away the metallic surface. The computer keys were coated with her oily grime. The screen was smudged with her fingerprints. Each sticker and decal had been carefully chosen and applied. Susan knew every scratch and speck on that computer like she knew the freckles and scars on her own flesh.

And Gretchen had found a way inside it.

Susan inched forward in her socked feet, peering at the tiny black eye of the camera lens installed above the laptop’s screen. She clutched her robe closed. You could take over someone’s computer remotely if you loaded the right malware. Susan had done a story about that once. You could even use the computer’s own camera to spy on someone.

A trickle of bathwater dripped down the back of Susan’s neck. Her MacBook was her life. She wrote everything on it—every story, every half-assed attempt at a novel, every e-mail, every personal thought she’d ever cared enough about to write down. Now she approached it grimacing, arm outstretched, like the computer was something alive, something dangerous, something infected. When she got close enough, she stretched her trembling hand across the bed and slammed the laptop closed. The Apple logo on the back glowed white for a few seconds and then went dark.

Chapter 29

CHAPTER

29