Two days later, just as she began to relent, Bobby came to her with a plan. And the home and second-home addresses of all the board members from all the relevant corps: Dow Chemical, Monsanto, General Dynamics, Westinghouse, Raytheon, DuPont, Honeywell, IBM and Valence Chemical. He carefully worked out the timing, the execution, the communiqués to the press.

But now Mary developed doubts. She started to wonder if he had been right in the first place, that denying the complexity of the world made you as bad as they are. Even if you do act, you may be guilty of the wrong motive—vanity, or self-righteousness. Or maybe you will pick the wrong tactic. Perhaps your analysis was incorrect. You could be making things worse, more polarized. And finally, maybe they shouldn’t relinquish their purchase on the humanity of everyone. Maybe that was the very moral line that saved them from becoming the people they despised and judged. She could argue it either way, with equal conviction. But there was no point in discussing it again. She knew he wasn’t looking back. He was now a force in motion. She watched as everything came together. And then she helped everything come together. This was the power of a couple—their doubts occurred at different times and canceled each other out, making them much more fearless as a pair than they would ever be on their own. And that’s how a life changes—it could go either way, and then it just goes one way.