Wednesday, November 18: I made my first mortgage payment when I was 26, and my last one two months later

This is the chapter in which we discover that Brenda is Dag’s ex-wife, and Simon is his ex-best friend. They were all going to be partners and start a company together after they had paid their dues in the consulting industry. But Dag didn’t realize how close partners they had become. He had been married for two years and had just closed on his new house with Brenda when he found out she’d been having an affair with Simon from the beginning. He signed a quit-claim deed on the house and paid off the mortgage with a personal loan??? Or something. He has always referred to the event as the “great fire,” in which he lost everything, including his faith in marriage.

But we also find out that Brenda has always been able to manipulate Dag. So much so that the best thing he could do for himself was to walk out on the whole thing, his marriage, his two friends, and their big business plans. Instead, he joins a big consulting firm out east and becomes a top computer wiz in the accounting world, growing with the industry and understanding computers in a natural way that led him to the top in the IT department. That’s where he was when he decided to start his own business and came back to Seattle to become a computer forensics expert and investigator in the fledgling personal computer world. Then, when he least expected it, his one-time friends started coming back into his life, just at the time when it seemed he was losing it.

End Chapter Eighteen