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Carolyn and Joanna exchanged looks. He’d been talked about, he knew, and they’d judged him to be distinctly not okay. Their neighbor was a big, strapping woman who’d run a gardening business before she took time off for the baby. “Kind of butch” was how Joanna described her, admiringly, referring t…

They sat as they always did, side by side at the counter looking out into the empty hall. The same lunch: turkey on rye, no mayo, wrapped in paper on blue plastic trays.

“How’re things?” asked Ethan.

Steghman’s group was slipping its schedule; the key module being redesigned was his.

“Fine…

His flight was early. I had to race downstairs to meet him.

“Shitty flight” was how he greeted me. “Where’s the car?”

There are some disappointments you simply can’t let yourself feel right at the moment. There were obstacles to negotiate, after all—the luggage cart to be gotten through eleva…

That could have been Ethan Levin, I think, as I watch the man’s nervous swipes at his hair and remember the whole story again, like it or not. Ethan had eight times the stock options I did. He wouldn’t have had to work for the next six start-ups, wouldn’t have had to do consulting. He’d be long ret…

Whatever guilt I felt at my extended idleness (which was considerable; my mother worked until the last months of her life) was tempered by the admiration I received from the new paper millionaires the Internet boom was creating by the thousands all around me. Young people I met admired me—though th…