She checked her messages and found the correspondence between her and the contractor who was acting on behalf of the consultancy. She’d given them nothing. He, stupidly, had repeated back to her something he’d heard someone else say that she said, but it was completely deniable. She checked the next message and she’d neither confirmed nor denied it. She was clever like that. Crafty. It came from ducking and diving. You can’t con a con, Diane had said once. She’d heard it before, but as she looked through the messages, she saw herself quite clearly for a moment. Everything was calculated. She had justified it to herself, but here she was, message after message, trying to do the job without leaving a trace that she’d done it. None of it read like she was proud of what she was doing.

Probably, she’d get away with it – in the world. The bigger problem was the conflict of interest. She’d been protecting the users in her moderation role while fucking them by helping build the app. If she’d said no, any number of other people would have done what she did. It wasn’t the biggest part of the job and she wasn’t any smarter than hundreds of other people. She’d never sought any kind of praise or attention. No one would know it was her. But she wasn’t sure, reading over it all now, if she could act like this and stay sober. She had to live with herself and if she couldn’t live with herself, she’d have to drink, and, realistically, if she drank again, she might as well fire a gun at her face. If she was lucky, she’d die fast, but she’d had friends who drank for years and got sicker and sicker. Angrier and angrier. But just couldn’t die. When Greta and Peggy were twenty-five and still living in the other city and still studying and living in cold flats, a friend shot herself in the face and survived. She had two teeth left and no palate, but the bullet had missed everything important. She was blind and was hard to understand and she came back to meetings and was still sober now as far as Margaret knew. ‘How are you?’ Greta had asked, at the time, just after she got out of hospital. ‘I can’t lie,’ she’d said. ‘Things are pretty fucked.’ Greta and Peggy nodded. ‘But there are small moments when it’s bearable,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure anyone would say the same thing.’ And they laughed with her, because she was right. ‘Women don’t shoot themselves in the head,’ someone had said to Margaret years later, when she’d told the story, trying to use it as an example of how suffering was relative.