“Is this real?” My mom asked.

I couldn’t figure out if she was asking rhetorically or not. I said yes, and then sat quietly as my parents discussed what to do.

I gave them one photo of the 394 gigabytes she had. Lazily secured on a hard drive inside her laptop. Encrypted, but with a passcode I guessed in thirty seconds.

It’s all sitting in my external storage. Its all over the world; cached in my desktops, some in my laptop, dozens of copies. All encrypted of course, and only I knew the passcode.

I thought about deleting it. My parents kept on talking without me.

I gave them only one photo. Not any ones of the 103 other people on there, or any of the other 167,297 files.

Just one.