It took Katya a moment to process what she had just seen. Dan…Blum…was @invisibletechman? No. No no no no no. It made no sense. It not only made no sense, but it was wrong on every level. Completely wrong. This could not be real. “Wait. What? You’ve been running invisibletechman? But…what? You’re not even—”
“Black?” Dan said. “I know.” Now he was smiling in a way that was way, way too self-satisfied. “I just figured it would seem more authentic if people assumed that the owner of the account was black. I never actually said I was black. I might have implied it, but go back through my tweets—I never actually said it.”
“Oh, come on, that’s bullshit and you know it,” Katya said. “And that’s so fucked up. Why would you even do that? Like…to what end? It doesn’t make sense. Just to, like, cause trouble?”
“I was commenting on the insularity and myopia in so much of the tech industry,” Dan said. “A place rife with sexism, racism, and probably every other ism in existence. It felt like this was the most effective way to do it. I could give people in this industry a voice, someone people typically don’t hear from. Don’t you think I succeeded? Like, now people are talking about this stuff! They weren’t before.”
“You’re an asshole,” Katya said. “I didn’t say you could speak for me or for, like, Trevor or anyone else in this industry who’s not a white man like you. God,” she practically spat. “It is so fucking typical that a fucking forty-year-old white dude would be the one running this account. What a fucking joke.”
“Okay, first of all, I’m thirty-nine, and—”
“You’re a fraud.”
“Jesus, Katya, I thought you’d be excited that the mystery had finally been solved! You’re blowing this way out of proportion.”
“Solved? You fucking told me. How was I supposed to solve it?” It was true, she was upset, but she had every right to be pissed. Suddenly, something else dawned on her. “Wait a second. Wait a second. That’s how he—you—tweeted out the recording of Isabel! Because I had sent it to you. Sent it to you, not to your dumb parody Twitter account. How could you even do that to me? I could have lost the whole story.”
“It’s actually not a parody,” Dan said. “More like a satire.”
“Whatever the fuck it is,” Katya said. Dan had never seen her get really mad, she realized. Well, now he was going to. “Don’t mansplain your fake Twitter account to me, okay?”
“Whatever, Katya,” he said. “You probably wouldn’t have even published your story if I hadn’t tweeted out that recording. That blew this whole thing wide open. I was really hoping you’d pick up on my hints that we really wanted the story, but you were just moving so slowly. I needed to get things going. You’d been, like, sitting on your ass about it for weeks. Even after you knew how important these impactful stories were to us.”
“I had not been sitting on my ass!” Katya said. She was practically yelling now, and the people walking by them on the sidewalk were giving them looks. “You know I have not been sitting on my ass.”
Dan took one last drag of his cigarette and threw it to the ground. “You know what,” he said, “I think maybe just take the rest of the day off. Just…relax. We can pick your story back up again tomorrow.” She was silent. “I’m going to go back inside now.” He squeezed her shoulder. She flinched. “Hey, it’s fine, just take the rest of the day off, okay?” He patted her shoulder and went inside.
She wanted to scream or break something. Preferably Dan’s face, she thought. What an asshole! She squeezed her eyes shut. Do not cry, she thought. Do. Not. Cry. She wanted to take the rest of the day off, but she was annoyed that Dan had suggested it, and she also didn’t want to go back inside to get the rest of her things. When she opened her eyes, Sabrina was standing in front of her with a smug look on her face. “Lovers’ quarrel?” she said. Her tone was cold. Triumphant.
Katya felt herself blushing. “Hardly. Your husband is an ass,” she said. “I don’t know what he told you, but he’s not my lover.’ He never was. He won’t leave me alone, though.”
“I’m supposed to believe that?” Sabrina said. “Come on, Katya.”
“Believe what you want to believe,” Katya said. “But I’m telling you the truth.” She almost felt sorry for Sabrina, who seemed to think she was finally going to get her big, dramatic showdown. But of course a woman like Sabrina would think her husband was so irresistible that he could have his pick of lovers. (Who said lover, anyway?) As though Katya would want that.
Sabrina’s face crumpled. “Ugh,” she said. “So much for my brave confrontation of the other woman. I can’t even get that right.” She sighed and stared up at the sky. “Can I bum one of those?” She pointed to Katya’s cigarette.
“Uh, yeah, sure,” Katya said. She took the pack out of her back pocket and handed one to Sabrina. “Need a light?” Sabrina nodded. She handed Sabrina her lighter. It took her a couple of tries, but she finally managed to light it.
“Sorry,” Sabrina said. “I just…I had this fantasy about confronting you about Dan, so when I saw you two fighting out here and then he stormed back inside—I don’t even think he saw me—I thought, Aha, I got them! It seemed perfect.”
“Confronting me about Dan?” Katya said. “How—I mean, why did you need to confront me about Dan?”
“I saw a couple of texts,” Sabrina said. “He was trying to get you to come meet him for a drink, and, look, when you’ve been with someone for more than ten years and you have two kids—there aren’t a lot of late-night texts to other women about getting drinks.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “Though I guess, now that I think about it, you’re right, he was the one trying to get you to go out.”