But Desmond couldn’t contain his curiosity. He looked the companies up. Both were dead ends. They didn’t seem to exist beyond a few corporate records. There were no offices, no websites, not even phone numbers. They were like shells with seemingly endless amounts of cash.

Another mystery, closer to home, did get solved: Peyton was going to attend Stanford Medical School. She told him at her apartment one night, over dinner—lasagna she had cooked that was the best meal he had eaten in some time.

“That’s great,” he said. “It’s nearly impossible to get in.”

“I was worried, honestly.”

“I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

“I know you will. It’s why I wanted to stay here in the area. I don’t want us to be apart. We have to start thinking about the future.”

The words we and us hung there in the air, present but unacknowledged.

Peyton used those words more often after that. She talked about the future more frequently. She asked whether he wanted to have kids. Where he wanted to live: in the city, a suburb, or the country, as he had done growing up. What sort of life he wanted his children to have. What he thought work-life balance should be for people with kids. Whether he wanted to travel if they had the chance.

Desmond found himself utterly unable to answer her questions. As the months went by, she began to apply more pressure, subtle at first, then more directly. Desmond’s answer was always the same: that he was so focused on work at the moment that it was hard for him to imagine these scenarios.

“It’s like a train in a tunnel. You don’t know what’s on the other side. How can you say what you’ll do when you come out?”

That set her off. “You’re not a train in a tunnel, Desmond! We’re real people. It’s not hard to imagine.”

But for Desmond it was impossible. Throughout his entire life he’d always been at the mercy of someone, or something, else. The fire. Orville. Silicon Valley. And now he wanted independence. Freedom. That meant money, and once he had it he believed he could sort his life out. Then he could answer Peyton’s questions, which haunted him more and more.

With each month, he saw the prospect of financial freedom slipping away. Four more companies he owned options in folded. SciNet’s rate of growth slowed. The initial rush was over; those storage closets full of old equipment had been cleaned out, and now the users were spending less per month. Management came up with several ideas: expanding to Europe and using the platform to help industrial companies buy and sell equipment. Both presented new challenges.