"Yes," she said, "that's a good idea. You're young, and there's a life for you there. You can start something up, or go to work for someone else's startup." It felt weird coming out of her mouth, like a betrayal of the Valley, of some tribal loyalty to this tech-Mecca. But after all, wasn't she selling up and moving east? "There's nothing in Oregon," Fiona said, snuffling. "There's something everywhere. Let me tell you about some friends of mine in Florida," and she told her, and as she told her, she told herself. Hearing it spoken aloud, even after having written about it and written about it, and been there and DONE it, it was different. She came to understand how fucking *cool* it all was, this new, entrepreneurial, inventive, amazing thing she was engaged in. She'd loved the contrast of nimble software companies when compared with gigantic, brutal auto companies, but what her boys were doing, it made the software companies look like lumbering lummoxes, crashing around with their fifty employees and their big purpose-built offices. Fiona was disbelieving, then interested, then excited. "They just make this stuff, do it, then make something else?" "Exactly -- no permanence except for the team, and they support each other, live and work together. You'd think that because they live and work together that they don't have any balance, but it's the opposite: they book off work at four or sometimes earlier, go to movies, go out and have fun, read books, play catch. It's amazing. I'm never coming back here." And she never would. She told her editor about this. She told her friends who came to a send-off party at a bar she used to go to when she went into the office a lot. She told her cab driver who picked her up to take her to the airport and she told the bemused engineer who sat next to her all the way back to Miami. She had the presence of mind not to tell the couple who bought her house for a sum of money that seemed to have at least one extra zero at the end -- maybe two. And so when she got back to Miami, she hardly noticed the incredible obesity of the man who took the money for the gas in her leased car -- now that she was here for the long haul she'd have to look into getting Lester to help her buy a used Smart-car from a junker lot -- and the tin roofs of the shantytowns she passed looked tropical and quaint. The smell of swamp and salt, the pea-soup humidity, the bass thunder of the boom-cars in the traffic around her -- it was like some kind of sweet homecoming for her. Tjan was in the condo when she got home and he spotted her from the balcony, where he'd been sunning himself and helped her bring up her suitcases of things she couldn't bear to put in storage.