He imagined the progress bar crawling across her screen. 10%... 40%... 85%. With every percent, he felt himself drifting closer to her. He wasn't just a character in a story; he was a virus of the heart. He would sit in her "Downloads" folder, nestled between a PDF of a syllabus she’d never read and a JPEG of a sunset she didn't take.

Elena would drop her tablet, the screen cracking against the floor, but the story wouldn't stop. The epub was already indexed. He was in her cloud now. He was in her sync history.

He imagined her—the girl who would click "Download." Let's call her Elena. Elena, with the messy bun and the penchant for dark thrillers. She thinks she’s safe behind her firewall, scrolling through a pirated book site at 2:00 AM because she’s too impatient for the library and too broke for Amazon.

"You," he whispered, the name of the file glowing on his laptop screen: You- Caroline Kepnes.epub . He wasn’t just a bookseller anymore; he was data. He was a collection of ones and zeroes, waiting to be downloaded, waiting to be read .

When she finally clicked it, the e-reader app would bloom to life. The first sentence would hook her. “You walk into the bookstore and you keep your purse on the counter.”

"I see you, Elena," the text on page forty-two would read. "I see the way you bite your lip when you’re nervous. I see that your webcam light just flickered. Don't be scared. It’s just me. It’s just us."

Joe Goldberg smiled in the dark of the digital void. In a world of infinite information, he had finally found the most direct route to his next "You."