“Hey,” Sabrina said. She and Isabel hugged. “Katya’s here too.” Katya waved. Isabel waved back.
“Sit, you two,” Isabel said. She gestured to the pink velvet armchair across from the sofa and sat up. “Here, someone can sit next to me.” She patted the space next to her. Sabrina sat. Katya sat in the armchair. “Thanks for coming over,” she said. She reached for a mug that was sitting on her coffee table and took a sip. Sabrina glanced out the window, which looked out on the Williamsburg Bridge.
“No problem,” Sabrina said, even if she wasn’t sure she actually believed that. “Great view, by the way.” How did Isabel afford this apartment? She couldn’t be making that much more than Sabrina—whenever you started somewhere as an assistant and worked your way up, your salary was never exactly what it should be. Then again, Isabel didn’t have two kids and a shopping addiction.
“Thanks. Yeah, I love this place. Who knows how much longer I’ll be able to stay in it, though.” The three of them were silent for a moment. “Do you know what you’re gonna do yet?” she asked Sabrina.
“Do?” Sabrina said. “In what sense?”
“Like, are you gonna stay at TakeOff after all this?”
“Oh,” Sabrina said. “I don’t know. I mean, shit, I’d love to quit with you in solidarity, but…God. You know, if I was your age, I totally would. I would totally quit, and take a stand, and tell everyone to just fuck right off.”
“Yeah!” Isabel said. She sat up straighter on the couch and grinned. “That’s the spirit.”
“I can’t, though,” Sabrina said quietly. “My life is just…more complicated right now. I wish I still had only myself to think about. But…I never told you this, Isabel, because it didn’t seem appropriate since you were, like, my boss, but now that you’re not—I’m in a lot of debt. I really fucked up and just, like, started buying stuff online and it got completely out of control, and I basically don’t have any credit cards I can even use anymore, and Dan just found out and he’s so pissed at me…It’s not the best time for me to quit.” She cringed, wondering how Isabel was going to take this confession.
“No, I get it,” Isabel said. She sounded like she actually did. “I understand. Just like…knowing that you would quit, that’s what matters to me.”
Sabrina reached over and took Isabel’s hand and squeezed it. “You’re a good person,” she said. “No matter what happens, remember that.”
“There are a lot of people right now who don’t think so,” she said. She glanced at Katya. “You’ve seen the shit that people are saying about me, right? It’s like…bad. There’s a thread on a men’s rights subreddit about me that has, like, over twelve hundred comments. And I had to just delete Twitter from my phone because I was getting so many notifications, mostly from guys who are telling me I’m a slut, I deserve to be raped, Andrew is a cuck, whatever that means…” She trailed off. “People are so fucked up.”
Katya nodded. She looked uncomfortable. She hadn’t said anything since they walked into Isabel’s apartment. I wonder what’s going through her head right now, Sabrina thought. She was so inscrutable. Was she mentally cataloging everything in the apartment, everything they were saying, to use it against them later? Or had she truly come in peace? “I have seen it, yes,” Katya finally said. “And…I’m sorry.” Everyone was quiet again. “Look, Isabel…I don’t regret writing the story. I don’t. I think it’s important for people to know about Mack. But I guess…I just wasn’t totally expecting everything to play out the way it did. And if I’d known that people were going to be so horrible to you…”
“You would’ve done what?” Isabel asked. “I don’t think there’s actually anything you should have done differently. That’s the sad part.”
The three of them were silent for a moment. Then Katya glanced at Sabrina. “You know that Twitter account invisibletechman?”
“Yeah,” Isabel said. “They were the ones who tweeted my recording. Which I still don’t know how they even got.”
“Well, they got it because I sent it to them,” Katya said.
“Huh?” Isabel said. “Why would you do that?”
“Well…I didn’t know I was sending it to them,” Katya said. “I thought I was sending it to my editor. To Dan.” She paused to let this sink in. “I thought I was sending it to Dan,” she repeated.
“Wait,” Isabel said. “Dan sent it to invisibletechman? Why would he do that?”
“No,” Sabrina said. She was putting something together that she didn’t love. At all. “Dan was invisibletechman.” She watched Isabel’s eyes widen as she processed all of this. “And I was the one who sent you the recording, Katya, because Isabel asked me to.” Isabel nodded. Sabrina felt sick. “My husband is…” She couldn’t even finish the sentence.
Katya nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “He said he was giving a voice to marginalized people in tech by creating the account.” She rolled her eyes.
“God, that is so gross,” Sabrina said. “I guess being married to someone Korean makes you qualified to pretend to be a black person on Twitter.”
“Oh, he was very emphatic that invisibletechman never actually said he was a black person,” Katya said.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Sabrina said. “I’m…I mean, I know I had nothing to do with it, but I feel like I need to apologize for my husband’s ridiculous actions.”
“It’s okay,” Isabel said. “We don’t have to hold ourselves responsible for the dumb shit men do.”
“I’d drink to that,” Sabrina said.
“Do you want a drink?” Isabel said. “I can open a bottle of wine.”