Those disagreements, combined with the attention the site was now getting from the media and government, had turned the lovebirds’ once-in-a-while wrangles into a once-a-day war. “You have to quit,” Julia would yell. “You’re going to end up in jail for the rest of your life, and how am I supposed to get married and have a family with someone who is in jail?” To which Ross would calmly reply, “I can’t get caught because I’m protected by Tor and Bitcoin.” He would then begin a rehearsed diatribe about his legacy. The site, he proclaimed, would be his greatest contribution to society. He was helping people, keeping them safe from the streets, where drug deals could get one thrown in jail or, worse, hurt or killed. Didn’t Julia see that? Didn’t she want to be a part of it?
As if they were repeatedly reading from the same script, a verbal brawl would ensue, and then one of them would storm out of the apartment or into another room. A few hours later, love would magnetically draw them back together. They would make up and fall asleep in each other’s arms, Julia dreaming of a white picket fence and a couple of giggling children running around in the yard, Ross’s reveries of the Silk Road growing so large that one day he would overturn the drug laws and be lauded for the positive impact he had had on society.
The next morning the pugnacious lovers would start all over again.
The site had also started to affect other areas of their relationship. Julia wanted to go out dancing or be taken to a nice restaurant with all the money he was now making from his commissions. And yet Ross was perfectly happy eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while tapping out code on his laptop. Days would go by where he wouldn’t shower, would barely talk to her, and would just sit in his chair in their bedroom (often naked) on his computer.
Julia had begun worrying so much about the state of their relationship, and Ross’s well-being in general, that she had started to have panic attacks on a regular basis. She peered at men in the grocery store and wondered if they were undercover cops who knew that she lived with the man who had started the Silk Road. She cried in the shower. She loved Ross so much, but he appeared to love his Web site more.
Life went on like this for weeks, each day echoing the last, until one evening Ross came home with fervent excitement in his eyes. Enraptured, he told Julia he had to show her something. He opened his laptop, fiddled around for a few seconds, and then spun the computer around for her to see. Over time he had made every effort possible to convince Julia that the hard drugs should be listed on the Silk Road, using his salient argument that the government should have no right to tell you what you could and could not put in your own body and that crime and violence would fall if there were no drug wars. While she didn’t necessarily agree with his viewpoints, she understood his reasoning, and it made sense in theory. But there would be no convincing Julia of the merits of what he was about to show her.
“Look,” Ross said proudly as he pointed at his laptop screen. “There are guns that just got listed on the site.”
Julia stared in disbelief, a feeling of nausea enveloping her. “Ross,” she said pleadingly. “This isn’t normal.”
“Why isn’t it normal? It’s our constitutional right to have guns, we should be able to have—”
She interrupted him: “Tell me why would someone need to buy guns anonymously.”
“That’s not my responsibility to ask; it’s not up to me to decide why someone does something,” he remarked, annoyed that Julia didn’t share his excitement. “It’s the people’s choice.”
“Yes, but—” she began, but he cut her off.
“So the government can have guns, but the people can’t?” Ross said. (He would echo this on the Silk Road, privately telling his new employees, “I’ve always been pro gun. It is a power equalizer against tyrannical governments.”)
Julia intuitively knew her conscience was right. But even when she offered clever, cogent retorts, Ross would shut the conversation down by simply saying, “Well, we will just have to disagree on this.”
For Julia, the guns were an enough-is-enough moment. Light drugs? Absolutely. Hard drugs? Fine. Maybe Ross was right; maybe we all did have the right to put whatever we wanted in our own bodies. How could the government say that we could drink alcohol, which killed ninety thousand Americans a year; or that people could smoke cigarettes, which killed forty thousand people a month in the United States; or even red meat, which caused hundreds of heart attacks a day; and it wasn’t okay to smoke weed, which killed no one? But buying illegal guns anonymously? This Julia couldn’t agree with. A few weeks later she boarded a plane to New York City.
She figured that fall in the Northeast would help clear her head. Erica greeted her with a big hug. Then they sprawled out on the living room floor and talked. In the distance, through the window, she could see the soft white and blue lights of Yankee Stadium radiating into the night sky. The setting couldn’t have been more different from the chaos of the past few months, and as the sounds of the Bronx hummed outside, Julia made a decision. She sat up from the floor and turned to Erica. “I have to tell you something,” Julia said.
“What?” Erica replied.
“You have to promise me you will never tell anyone,” Julia pleaded. “Never! Ross would kill me.”
“I swear!” Erica said, now curious about the secret that loomed between them. “I promise.”
Julia took one more deep drag of the joint and held the smoke in her lungs for a few seconds. She blew out, watching the cloudy whiteness dissipate into the air, and then she told Erica everything.
Chapter 14
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!
Tears welled up in Ross’s eyes as he frantically ran up the stairs toward Julia’s apartment. He was overtaken by fear, mixed with anger, as he swung the door open, barged inside, and started yelling at her. “I can’t believe what you’ve done!” he shrieked, jolting the door closed behind him. “I’m done!”
“What are you talking about?” Julia stammered, looking up from her laptop, shocked by the abrupt intrusion and then even more astonished by the very visible look of terror on Ross’s face.
“You betrayed my trust!” Ross screamed as he wiped tears from his eyes. “I can’t believe you told someone.” Panic grabbed and shook him as he tried to figure out what to do. In his entire life he had never been this angry. Never this afraid.
In that moment Julia knew exactly what had happened, though it would be another few minutes before she knew exactly how it had happened. It dawned on her very quickly that this had to have something to do with Erica. But how did Ross know about it now? And why was he so frightened? Julia played the events of the past few weeks over in her mind as Ross stood in front of her seething.
After Julia had returned from New York City in the early fall, she had decided to break up with Ross, telling him that if he wanted to continue running his site, he would have to do it elsewhere; she wouldn’t allow it in her apartment any longer. He had chosen to do just that and rented his own place across town in Austin.