When I ran out of things to tell them, I started telling other people. But I’m running out of people to tell.

3. reputation.

In keeping with Silicon Valley protocols, the Company supplied a vaguely utopic atmosphere in the hopes of raising employee satisfaction and consequently office attendance. Every day, I arrived at seven in the morning to take a class in barre or pilates or HIIT. I was at my desk by nine to attend to any urgent emails, then made myself a coffee with the fancy espresso machine before the daily standup at ten.

By noon, I had done maybe an hour’s worth of work, and after a long lunch that often lingered into a second hour, I might have a meeting or two, or complete some work, or take a leisurely coffee break by the pond with a teammate. After a few more clicks on my computer, maybe even submitting a pull request if I felt particularly productive, I took an extra cafeteria to-go container on the shuttle home for dinner.

I lived in a luxury apartment complex with housekeeping services. In the evenings, I returned to my one-bedroom of laminate wood floors and ate Company salmon and quinoa in bed with my latest HBO show. I never had to cook or clean or drive, a way of life which gave me some unscientific sense of having arrived.

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Clyde, who is a high school music teacher in Detroit, likes to tell me that software engineering is a soulless, soul-sucking occupation. I tell him that the use of soulless and soul-sucking is somewhat redundant, and incongruous when combined with occupation, a word that carries the connotation of filling or inhabiting.

“See?” Clyde replies. “You’re so great with words. You could be so much more.”

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Coding requires an unexpected savvy for words and, if your office is fun and quirky, wordplay. The Company was fun and quirky. We had a script nestled in the archives for cleaning the database titled windex.py. Commonly executed functions within the script included “remove_stain(id)”, “remove_stains_by_value(value)”, and “wipe_squeaky_clean()”. This last one with an all-caps comment: USE ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY WHICH MEANS PROBABLY NEVER.

It was more acceptable to write somewhat obscure meanings into the code when it wasn’t frequently touched code. My work on the frontend tended to require more upfrontness, but I still managed to add my own personal touch to new pages. When building a page involving a table, I named the table variable “tabletown” and “_populate()”d it with “residents.” In my pull request, he left a comment on “residents”: Think this one’s going to have to change to “data,” unfortunately.

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The Coworker joined two years after me. She had the spirit of the newly graduated—energetic and eager to please. Ready to start the rest of her life. She reminded me of me.

Maybe that was why I took to her so immediately. I showed her the ropes—the code base, the tutorial platform for languages she would need to know and the best tutorials for them, the scrum board on which to drag and drop the development tasks assigned to her, tiles with strangely cased titles like, “Load Contacts toggle in Settings NOT working” and “location icon doesn’t show in NavBar when location is ON.” I bought her coffee every now and then and encouraged her to take on challenging projects and ask for a promotion sooner rather than later.

“As women, especially women of color, we need to be proactive,” I told her. “We have to advocate for ourselves early on, before our voices get buried forever.” That was before I knew about explosions, how in a blink, your beautifully crafted career could collapse on top of you in a rubble heap. How you not only have to ask your manager for a promotion, but you also have to ask for lines not to be crossed, and you have to ask in the right way, so no lines are mentioned, but how this song and dance can also backfire on you because when HR asks you later on whether you had made your stance clear, you cannot honestly say, “Yes, like crystal.”

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These days I can sleep and wake whenever I want, which means that I am often still asleep when Elona goes into work, and the house is silent by the time I shuffle into the kitchen and help myself to the dregs of her French press. My latte art skills have declined since moving to Seattle.

Coffee procured, I curl back up in bed with my laptop and begin to code. At first, I tried to incorporate an element of fun and quirkiness in my freelance work, but that mainly resulted in infinite while loops that printed “I feel shitty” to the console for as long as the “manager_was_idiot” variable was still equal to “True”, which it always was. Or when I wrote if statements, the conditions were often phrases like, “if i had left the office early that day,” “else if i had refused his coffee,” “else if i had never taken the job,” none of which were syntactically correct, or even fun or quirky for that matter, so I stopped.

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Shortly after we kiss, it starts raining, and James invites me to his apartment which is apparently a couple blocks away. On the walk over, he asks me how I’m finding Seattle.

“Is it everything you hoped and dreamed?” he inquires sardonically, angling the umbrella to cover me while exposing his own shoulder to the elements.

“Well, mostly I hoped to get out of a place that had become incredibly suffocating,” I tell him. “So in that sense, Seattle is exactly what I hoped and dreamed.” It fascinates me that a city can feel so refreshing not by any merit of its own but rather for the fact that a specific person does not inhabit it.

“Why Seattle, then?” James presses.

“Convenience. My friend Elona—her parents have a house here. So I’m paying very low rent.” It had taken embarrassingly little convincing on Elona’s part to get me to relinquish my resplendent lifestyle in the Bay Area, the place I’d called home for the past three years.

“We can watch Girls,” Elona said whenever she tried to pitch it to me. “And Gilmore Girls. Golden Girls. All the ‘Girls.’”

“What if I want to watch something else?” I asked. “Like Parks and Rec, or Silicon Valley.”

“We can watch those, too. But why would you bother when you can watch Girls?”

4. to be accountable or subordinate to.

Most of my time with Elona is spent eating raspberry sorbet on the couch while watching reruns of Girls. There is an episode in the first season where Hannah tells Jessa about her boss, an old married man who gropes her. “Okay, be honest,” Jessa tells Hannah. “You’re sort of flattered by the whole thing.”

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“Well, can the cursor be a train, at least?” a client asks. “And every time you click something, a little puff of steam could come out of the smokestack.”

“You don’t want that,” I tell them. Ninety percent of software engineering is figuring out what the client actually wants, rather than what they say they want, or think they want. As a person who once conflated the three in her own life, I have become very good at telling the difference.

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Sometimes I write letters to him. Usually I write on napkins because I don’t have much else to write on. Most of my media is digital. I will be eating canned soup heated in a saucepan and pick up one of the two pens that I stole at the dentist and write, “You were the worst three years of my life.” Sometimes I wish things upon him, like, “I hope you’re miserable today. Tomorrow, too.” Or, “I hope you never hurt anyone ever again.” Or, “I hope you’re doing well.”

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James kisses me again at the threshold of his bedroom, and it occurs to me that although I moved to Seattle to run away, I have not actually escaped anything. His hand caresses a piece of my hair—I can feel the heat of his hand on my skin, and for a second, I cannot breathe, although it is true the placement of his tongue in my mouth may be a contributing factor.

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My therapist tells me that the connection between an offender and a survivor runs very deep.

“Not in a good way,” she adds quickly. “There are very bad deep connections, too, like in your case, obviously.” She says this in response to my informing her that I feel inextricably linked to him, as though tied by my own sinew. I tell her that I feel as if to cut him out of my thoughts and emotions is to slice through my own skin, maybe even saw through flesh and bone.

“Just to check in,” she says, “have you had thoughts about harming yourself recently?”

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In my last three months at the Company, I showered every day, sometimes twice a day. I set the water to scalding and scrubbed every inch of my skin with a pumice stone until it was red and raw, as though I could shed it like a snake. As though I could emerge from the shower reborn, baby-soft and newly made.

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I was surprised when I found out he was married, the same way I was surprised when I found out he was forty. He had to reschedule our one-on-one because he had to go celebrate his wife’s birthday.

“You’re married?” I asked.

“Is that surprising?”

He was standing at the edge of my cubicle, his chin resting on his arms resting on the cubicle divider. There were no rings on his fingers.

“You seemed like a sad lonely bachelor,” I told him.

“Well, I’m a sad lonely married man,” he replied.

He had begun telling me a lot more than he used to, probably because I was a good listener, which he noted as a strength in my year-end progress report. By the start of my second year at the Company, I had amassed countless informational tidbits of varying utility, such as which managers made him want to tear his hair out, secrets to finessing the promotion cycle, and how when he drives home from work after team drinks, he listens to sad music and thinks how easy it would be to close his eyes and make it all stop. In one such conversation, he told me he was considering a divorce, and that things had been hard at home for a long time.

I often consider all the things I could have said during this conversation. I was two years into my job and good at it. We had a strong enough rapport that I could have said any number of things, and he probably would have taken it in stride. I could have said, “Maybe you should talk to a therapist.” Or I could have said, “This is a lot of information. Maybe too much information.” Or even before the conversation, when offered a coffee, I could have said, “I have a lot of work to do, I don’t think I have time,” which is what I ended up saying over and over again several months down the line. Only by then it was too late—nothing I said could dissuade him from offering me a coffee, or approaching me in other ways.

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Watching Girls again with Elona: “Someday,” Hannah tells Rich, her boss, after first trying to fuck him, then extort him, then sue him, “I’m going to write an essay about you, and I am not going to change your name. And then you can sue me.”

5. to present as the result of an examination of any matter officially referred.

Throughout the HR investigation, team members were discreetly pulled into meetings and asked for their assessment of him. I knew no one would have bad opinions to share. Even after his own interview, he acted no differently toward me than before, except he offered coffee less frequently. I worked from home as often as possible to avoid him, letting the National Geographic channel drone in the background as I lay in bed poking at my laptop keys. That was how I learned about the zone of silence.

When an explosion occurs, there are three auditory zones. First there is the immediate vicinity in which the explosion takes place, where the blast can be heard loud and clear. Beyond that lies a zone of silence. The sound of the explosion skips past you; you can’t hear it. Only when you are far enough away are you able to hear the explosion again.

I told Gianna about the zone of silence during one of our calls, which were infrequent because she had moved to Milan after graduation. It was eight in the morning for her, and she was getting ready to go into the biology lab.

“Girl, you know I love you,” Gianna said into the camera as she combed at her eyelashes with a mascara wand. “But what are you saying?”

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During our call, the Coworker was on her lunch break. As I walked the leaf-strewn sidewalk in concentric, blocky rings around my house, slowly honing in on my destination, I could picture her sitting outside in the California sun, slipping pieces of sushi into her mouth and chewing with a peaceful, cat-like expression. The Company’s sushi was really good. They brought in fresh salmon every day.

Between bites, the Coworker told me the latest news. Mark was on paternity leave. Teddy’s girlfriend had broken up with him and gone to grad school. Neel had just sent his oldest off to college. Here was Neel now; did I want to say hi?

“Hey,” he said into the phone speaker, his voice bright and familiar. “How’s Seattle? If you’re ever in the area stop by the office, okay?”

“Should I?” I humored him. “Will you get me cafeteria sushi?”

“Yeah, of course. Come visit us.”

Entertaining the idea was a pleasant exercise, though I could never execute it. For a long time, I couldn’t picture the office without recalling my final weeks there—the stale, suffocating office air, the sense of helplessness as I twisted my hands in my lap and listened to the HR representative tell me that they were closing the case.

“What, you’re not going to do anything about it?”

“We found no incriminating evidence.”

“So what do I do, then? He’s my manager.”

The representative, who three months earlier had said sympathetic words in sympathetic tones while I dropped tissue after crumpled tissue on her desk, now fixed me with a discerning stare. “Well, he says he’s ready to move past it, if you are.”

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After my talk with HR, I went back to my desk and stared mutely at my screen. windex.py was open in my editor because I’d been adding a “remove_stains_in_datetime_range(start, end)” function. I scrolled aimlessly up and down, and “wipe_squeaky_clean()”, the function for emergencies only, caught my eye.

It was easy to cause an explosion, I realized with sharp-edged clarity as I highlighted the function and clicked Run, almost without thinking. It was much harder to prevent one.

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In bed, after sex, I try to explain it to James.

“They say it’s like a breakup,” I tell him. I am lying next to him with my head on his shoulder, and he caresses my hair. “You have to say goodbye to all these people that you spent so many hours of your life with. You worked with them through all the ups and downs.” I realize I sound like a stock photo, so instead I try to describe to him the wonderment of putting your brain together with others, like the brains are meeting on their own subliminal plane, and from the depths of their thought synthesis you produce some really cool stuff.

“Stuff like, toggle switches?” James asks skeptically. He is in culinary school.

“Like new features. Pages with tables. And toggle switches. But they’re really nice toggle switches, with very fast reactive times.”

James stops caressing my hair, unconvinced. “I bet you could find a job with even nicer toggle switches. One where they would treat you less shittily.”

“Well, it wasn’t always shitty. It was really good, for a long time. And they had really good sushi.” He seems a little more convinced by that.

6. an official statement of facts, verbal or written.

On my last day, he didn’t come to the office—he had taken the day off. It had taken three months and one inconclusive HR investigation for him to realize I didn’t want to see him. The Coworker brought a cake that said, We’ll Miss You. It was strawberry shortcake and delicious with coffee. Then I turned my laptop and badge in and shook hands with the team.

“Good luck with the freelancing,” they said. “You’re going to do great things.” Though they were probably wondering why I was dropping the ball on my promising, still-nascent career. They didn’t realize corporations had become minefields to me. No one survives an explosion unscathed.

When I exited the building, I took a deep whiff of fresh air and messaged my friends.