She had, I came to realize, been keeping score since she was twenty-seven — every one of my losses a point for her, every one of my good years a threat to be managed — while I moved through the same decade thinking I was simply living near a sister who didn’t much like me.

That was the thing the drive finally taught me. None of it had been bad luck. All of it had been built.

Chapter 6 — The Archive

When I finally broke the encryption on the beige drive, five weeks after I’d found it, I was expecting — I don’t know what.

Passwords. Gossip. Something small and ugly and survivable. What I found was an archive.

Folder after folder, organized with the cold precision of a project manager, each one labeled with a year and a name and an objective.

It spanned more than a decade.