minutes. But to find someone who you wanted to talk to for 609 hours—that was rare.

The universe, he felt, was just—or if not just, fair enough.

How quickly you go from being the youngest to the oldest person in a room, she thought.

“Your cousin Albert told me that, in business, they call this a pivot. But life is filled with them, too. The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.

averred.

was a child, people could be lost forever, but people were not as easily lost as they once were. Increasingly, all you needed was the desire to convert a person from a digital conjecture to the unruly flesh.

“He is easier to grow than a carrot,” she remarked.

Marx took Sadie to the Nezu Shrine. The Nezu Shrine has a tunnel of red torii gates for visitors to pass through. Sadie asked what it meant when you passed under the gates, and Marx said in Shinto tradition, a gate represented passing from the mundane to the sacred. But Marx was not Shinto, so he did not entirely know. “I used to come here when I

Sam could be ignored, but the childish shared reference could not be. It was an invitation to play.