She came in three afternoons a week, and while he’d hoped those would be times he could absent himself, George didn’t like leaving Jess alone to chase away the odd shopper who came in off the street. True, Yorick’s was more of a project than a business, but he planned to break even one of these years. Jess had to be watched. She was well read, opinionated, unconcerned with profit. Also George liked watching her.

He was old money, a Microsoft millionaire now returned to Berkeley where he’d gone to college in the seventies, majoring in physics with a minor in psychotropics. He had worked in the Excel group when a long-haired physicist was not so uncommon, and Bill Gates still lived in a conventionally pretty house with a computer on the kitchen counter. Microsoft had been feisty in George’s day, competing for market share. By the time he left, the place was expanding geometrically, so that construction crews and moving trucks and summer interns swarmed the Redmond campus. Podlike buildings multiplied around the shallow pool known as Lake Bill. Theme cafeterias sprang up with different cuisines in each. The company picnic began to look like a county fair, except that the band playing was Chicago, flown in for the occasion.

As share prices soared, George’s friends had bought cars. They began with sports cars, and then they bought vintage cars, and finally, they bought kits and built custom cars from scratch. Then George’s friends bought houses on Lake Washington. They bought small houses, and then bigger houses, and then they renovated those houses and commissioned furniture: sculptural dining tables and beds and rocking chairs in bird’s-eye maple. They collected glass, and bought Chihulys by the dozen. They retired and purchased boats and traveled, and some started little companies and foundations of their own, and others flew to cooking classes in Tuscany and hosted fund-raisers for Bill Clinton. Along the way, they married and divorced, raised children, and came out, not necessarily in that order.