Chapter 50
KATE
Aweek of living in my crappy motel room.
I eat three meals a day, basic food picked up at the run-down grocery store half a mile away.
I can’t take chances with my health; the last thing I need now is to end up in the emergency room after I faint from feckin’ hunger.
So it’s back to the way Granny and I used to eat in Ireland—fresh fruit and lots of veg, tins of tuna and sardines, taken like medicine.
Every day, I long to ring Granny. I ache to hear Breagha’s voice. I consider what I could say to Mam or to Da, how I could make them take my side.
But I don’t dial one familiar number. I won’t give Wolf that weapon to use against me.
Instead, I fill my spare time writing code.
I start with the simplest programs I can think of: Designing a basic calculator, creating and updating a to-do list, building a scraper to extract information from online websites.
I force myself to take each project step by step, laying a solid foundation before I layer on lines of crisp, clear code.
There’s nothing flashy. Nothing fancy. None of the flourishes I’ve added for years, to make my projects beautiful.
If the programs I make were buildings, they’d look like Fort Knox carved out of a glacier. Sturdy. Square. Ugly. But no one can break in. No one can get past my defenses.
I’m obsessed. I start sleeping only six hours a night, then five, then four—and even then, I’m dreaming lines of code.
Night after night, I’m a perfect little machine, alone in my tiny room, back braced against flat pillows as I sit on my lumpy bed and squint at my computer screen beneath the dim bulb of the lamp on my nightstand.
I only turn the light off in the morning, once the sun has risen. Once it’s time to start the whole long day all over again.