So Rafe stayed on at Klamath, going through the motions, despite growing qualms about what he was doing, which were amplified by a New York Times article he unfortunately chanced upon (“What Happens to a Factory Town When the Factory Shuts Down?”) about the pet food employees he had personally helped render out of their jobs and into despair. Of course, the world was filled with moral compromises, Rafe knew that. It was possible to do some good while doing some bad (and he had done some good, he knew he had). So worse in a way was his starting to feel that what he was doing was not so much immoral as pointless. What was the point, really, of working to help people with four hundred million dollars earn another fifty? It didn’t matter to them (even if they thought it did), and it certainly didn’t matter to Rafe. So why was he spending sixty hours a week doing that? This line of thinking dangerously progressed to the larger question of what the purpose of life should be, which Rafe hadn’t thought much about since he was twelve years old and lay on his back on the lawn at night looking up at infinite stars. (This was shortly before his first serious crush—on a blonde girl in his English class who looked alarmingly cute in glasses—took over most of his mental processes and pretty much answered the question.) He was aware that some philosophies elevated the pointlessness of life to a positive—was that existentialism? maybe, someday, he should look it up—but, in the meantime, Rafe suspected there might be something a little less pointless than his current work at Klamath Capital. Like what? Socially conscious investing? Mentoring minority business owners? Law school? (No. Ugh.) Then Rafe’s brother, a year away from leaving the Marines, trying to decide whether to go back and get that Ph D or open a surf shop in Baja, was shot and killed in Helmand province by a Taliban fighter disguised as an Afghan police officer. After the funeral, Rafe made a call to a friend at Treasury and asked if there was any way they could use his services. He heard nothing for a month.

Then his friend called him back and said, actually, there was.

Now

NOW

“I don’t understand,” said Pleski. “Your bank wants to share my business?”

“It’s normal to use other investment firms,” Catherine said, “to diversify our clients’ holdings.”

“You don’t have to worry about her bank,” Rafe said. “We split our fee with them.”