Tears welled up in Ross’s eyes as he frantically ran up the stairs toward Julia’s apartment. He was overtaken by fear, mixed with anger, as he swung the door open, barged inside, and started yelling at her. “I can’t believe what you’ve done!” he shrieked, jolting the door closed behind him. “I’m done!”
“What are you talking about?” Julia stammered, looking up from her laptop, shocked by the abrupt intrusion and then even more astonished by the very visible look of terror on Ross’s face.
“You betrayed my trust!” Ross screamed as he wiped tears from his eyes. “I can’t believe you told someone.” Panic grabbed and shook him as he tried to figure out what to do. In his entire life he had never been this angry. Never this afraid.
In that moment Julia knew exactly what had happened, though it would be another few minutes before she knew exactly how it had happened. It dawned on her very quickly that this had to have something to do with Erica. But how did Ross know about it now? And why was he so frightened? Julia played the events of the past few weeks over in her mind as Ross stood in front of her seething.
After Julia had returned from New York City in the early fall, she had decided to break up with Ross, telling him that if he wanted to continue running his site, he would have to do it elsewhere; she wouldn’t allow it in her apartment any longer. He had chosen to do just that and rented his own place across town in Austin.
Though resentment had driven them apart, love (and sex) kept them in each other’s lives and they continued to date sporadically.
Soon after Ross moved out, Julia had convinced her friend Erica to move from New York City to Austin, renting the spare bedroom in Julia’s studio. Everything was moving along just fine until one evening, while partying, Erica had a bad acid trip from drugs purchased on the Silk Road and ended up in the hospital. When she returned, a fight erupted between her and Julia. Ross, who just happened to be there, tried to break up the brawl. This only exacerbated Erica’s and Julia’s tempers, and the fight grew so raucous that the police were called. Ross, who at first was trying to be helpful, soon lost his patience and pushed Erica out of the apartment. As Erica left in a taxi to the airport to return to New York City, Ross and Julia assumed that was the end of it. Good riddance, Erica; thanks for the story we’ll get to tell our friends tomorrow.
But the next morning, when Ross went back to his apartment, he opened his beloved laptop, and checked the stats on the Silk Road before navigating to his social media accounts. There, in all its terrifying glory, was a new message from Erica posted on his Facebook wall, publicly, for all to see. “I’m sure the authorities would like to know about Ross Ulbricht’s drug website,” she had written, like a giant neon billboard on the Internet.
The earth could have swallowed Ross whole. He began crying. He quickly deleted the message. Hands quivering, heart thumping, he picked up the phone and called Erica.
“Please, I am so sorry,” Ross stammered on the phone, tears streaming down his face. “Please promise me you will never tell anyone about the site.” Hearing Ross cry, sounding like he was going to kill himself, Erica assured him that she wouldn’t say anything to anyone and hung up.
But Ross’s mind swirled in a hurricane of thoughts. Who else knew?
Fudge!
There was only one person who could answer these questions. Ross got into his truck, floored it to Julia’s house, and then stormed up the stairs.
“You betrayed my trust!” he yelled. “Who else did you tell?”
“No one, I swear,” Julia pleaded as rivulets of tears rolled down her cheeks. “I can’t believe I told her. I’m so, so sorry. It was so stupid. It just came out of my mouth, I didn’t mean to—”
Ross grew angry. “You’re a liar. I can’t trust you.”
Hearing his accusations, Julia became defiant. “You left me alone in all of this. You told me all of this stuff and didn’t think about the risk to me.”
“This is a huge breach to my security,” Ross replied, “because someone actually knows me and knows my face and knows I made the site.”
Ross was remorseless and stern. Julia had broken his trust, and to Ross, that was much worse than any situation he had ever placed her in. Having simply uttered his name to someone else, having shared his most guarded secret in the world, she was done. Julia looked into his eyes, sensing that her explanation had only pissed him off more.
“Maybe this is a sign that you shouldn’t even be doing this site anyway,” Julia whimpered as she fell to the floor in tears, pleading for his forgiveness.
“No, it’s . . . not,” Ross stammered as he tried to calculate what he was going to do. “It means I’m going to have to hide. I’m going to have to leave Austin. All because of you.”
“I’m sorry, I’m—” Julia said, sobbing. But it was too late.
“This is over,” Ross said. He turned and walked out of the studio, the door slamming shut behind him.