To understand why my own mother tried to apologize for my existence five minutes earlier, you have to understand the lie I’d been letting them tell for fifteen years. You have to understand that while they thought I was rebooting routers, I was rewriting the map of modern warfare.

But right now, all that mattered was the sweat beading on Jack’s forehead and the realization that the “boring IT girl” held his entire career in the palm of her hand.

Rewind twenty minutes.