She’d always been cagey. The one time in her young life she’d really bared her passion to the world’s scrutiny had been the founding of Sthetix, which hadn’t gone well and had driven her into a reclusive life in the canyonlands around Moab. After meeting Corvallis she had spent several years as an Internet hate speech lightning rod, which had been fascinating in a way—but it was an essentially passive role, a work of performance art the whole point of which was to obliterate her real identity and bury it a million miles deep under fake news. Any thinking person who paid attention to that spectacle would end up asking, “But who is this person really?” To the extent that the project had succeeded, it had only made her real identity that much more enigmatic.

Under that cover, she had, with Corvallis, raised three children in weirdly normal urban-soccer-mom style. They had never made a decision that he’d work full-time and she wouldn’t; it had just developed along those lines. Under a pseudonym, she had maintained, for three years, a blog called “Luxury Crossover SUV as Prosthesis” in which she reimagined the elite-mom lifestyle as a centaurlike existence in which one’s body, and hence identity, effectively merged with the vehicle in which one spent several hours a day stuck in traffic between various child-related errands, or spiraling up and down immense multilevel parking structures while absorbed in podcasts or engaged in Bluetooth-mediated telepathy with other such persons. She had pursued a thread originating in Greek mythology, according to which centaurs were in some cases benevolent nurturers linked to the healing arts. The blog was witty but a little too unsparing and scary-smart to attract a wide audience—she had maybe ten thousand followers at peak, but they had a tendency to age out as their kids got into their teens. Anyway, the era of the awesomely huge gleaming luxury crossover SUV was coming to an end. Like Tolkien’s elves fading away and going into the west, they were dissolving into the used market as many families were downsizing their fleets in favor of ride-sharing services, and then fully autonomous vehicles that were owned by no one and everyone. So by the time Maeve’s and Corvallis’s kids were in the nine to twelve range, she had stopped writing the blog and, intellectually/artistically, gone dark for a decade.