The months that followed were kaleidoscopic, with the same pieces combining and recombining in different, dizzying configurations:

Gabi's love life kept failing, in increasingly ridiculous ways. She told him about the guys she was seeing, haltingly at first and then more easily as time went on, over lunches at the diner. Some were, as Josh thought of them, the "Gabi special." Deadbeats, plain and simple. Some, he could see, were symptoms of her characteristic terrible luck: a man trying to use a dating app to convince someone to serve as a surrogate for him and his wife (and then Josh lost some sleep worrying she'd agree to do it, as she took on the personal quest of solving their fertility problem). There was an actual porn star, who took sex off the table because it was "too much like work." One guy seemed promising and then he and Gabi realized they were second cousins and couldn't get past it.

She dated guys as though they were themed for holidays—a single father of no fewer than seven children at Father's Day, a firefighter around the Fourth of July. The porn star broke up with her on Labor Day for not respecting his work-life boundaries.

Elliot was also failing, in his ongoing quest to find a personal chef for Josh who met all of their respective specifications. Josh wasn't that eager for him to succeed, either, for reasons he didn't fully understand. It wasn't just that he didn't want to see anyone in Gabi's place. It was that… there was just something about cooking for himself. It was like therapy, but unlike his experience with actual therapy, there was no danger of unfortunate romantic feelings developing between him and his cookbooks.

Yolanda's daughter came home from her deployment, and Josh hired her as a coding intern and started training her while she applied to graphic design programs. Her son married Cheryl, in as beautiful a ceremony as Josh had ever paid for—so beautiful that a jealous Elliot had to be thwarted from sabotaging it.

Sofia had gone to work for Logan's start-up and was working all the hours under the sun. Logan guarded Sofia's time vigilantly. Josh actually had to trade connections and, now and then, his own labor, so that Sofia could be allowed out for an occasional coffee and check-in. Fixing a display issue on their website one day in August took him about three minutes, but he pretended it took three hours to buy Sofia a longer break. (Gabi, he knew, had other means of extracting her, more covert ones that likely traded on some combination of charm, looks, and simply ignoring Logan's rules.)

But the real story of the summer was that Josh had decided that one missing dimension of his life was in service to someone besides his friends. Gradually, he decided to funnel a larger portion of his money and time toward charitable ends.

Whatever insane idea his mother had about Gabi not being good enough for him, Josh had no trouble recalling why her opinion counted for so little. He remembered what it had been like growing up with a single mom who was persistently between jobs, who drifted in and out of town as her boyfriends changed, and in and out of consciousness as her blood alcohol level did. His mother had always had champagne tastes, but a small but steady stream of money from her parents—and time with his Nonna—had blunted the worst of the consequences of his mother's alternately reckless and indifferent parenting. But he could remember scraping together loose change to buy crackers and peanut butter for his brother one two-week stretch when his mother had left them alone longer than she usually did. He must have been about eight.

He had been terrified.

So with his own history and current form of therapy in mind, Josh started meeting with representatives from CalFresh, the state food benefits program, and local food pantries and shelters. He came to see the ways in which the high rate of food insecurity in San Francisco County was related to the gap between rich and poor—with so many very wealthy people, grocery stores and restaurants set price points which even people well above the poverty level struggled with. He met, too, with professors at Berkeley and Stanford who'd proposed solutions like giving hefty tax credits to owners of AirBnBs if they converted the space to affordable housing; or converting the city's 1,500 "underused alleys" into green spaces and community gardens. The influx of techies, he knew from reading the paper every day, had displaced lower-income people from old neighborhoods where they'd once been better-connected to resources in churches and community organizations.

There wasn't a "food crisis" in San Francisco so much as a set of interrelated crises in food, shelter, community culture, and employment for those without technical skills.

So "CHEF" was born, the acronym standing for Culture/Housing/Employment/Food. Josh's idea was to chip away at all the above problems at once. He began purchasing AirBnB properties in the city's old neighborhoods and working to set them up as co-ops, where low-income adults and families could live, improve skills in growing food that was relevant and interesting to their palates and cooking it at the food kitchens already in place around the city. He worked to simultaneously get his co-op residents networked into the rich array of job training opportunities around the city. They were contracted to live in the housing he was building up for three-year rotating terms. Over the course of that long summer, he became something that felt like a combination landlord and college counselor to the first eighty participants in his program.

He was more excited about his life than he'd ever been. He was also, rapidly, overwhelmed.

"CHEF needs a governing board," he told Gabi over a turkey burger and a side salad at the diner. "I want you to be on it."

"Josh, I was twenty minutes late to work this morning because I dropped a quarter in the toilet and needed it to get through the day. I don't think you're thinking clearly."

"You wouldn't be the only person," he grinned. "But you're the only actual chef I know—other than Adrianna, who's…"

Now Gabi grinned. "Not available."

"Right. I need someone with great skills to find me first-rate cooks and seeds and to source food for the kitchens. Someone who will signal to the folks in the program that I'm serious about it—give it the dignity of expertise. And I need it to be someone who shares my vision. And Gabi, you always have. You've been the biggest cheerleader of the program all along. You gave me half the reading I did on food scarcity and food cultures. C'mon. It's just a monthly meeting." This, of course, was a big fat lie. But he kept his face innocent by taking a big fat bite of his burger.

"That's a big fat lie, Josh. And you know it. And I know that you'll be chairman of said board, and you know, furthermore, that I have solemnly sworn never to work for you again."

"Well—technically—you'd be volunteering and not working. No money would change hands. And you and the rest of the Board would each have individual votes that count as much as mine. No veto power here. I just call meetings to order and get them catered." He glanced at her out of the corner of his eyes to see if she was buying it. "It's not bossy at all."

"I don't think…"

"Gabi. Don't do it for me." And here came his ultimate manipulation. "Do it for the one in ten folks in this county who will experience food or housing insecurity sometime this year."

After all that, she didn't have it in her to refuse—not when she'd wanted to do it so badly in the first place.

And she excelled; it was the perfect forum for her rare brand of charisma and doggedness. Josh shouldn't have been surprised, but he found in the months that followed that Gabi had a gift for board service like nothing that Josh had ever even heard of.

At mixers and fundraisers, she'd inadvertently insult potential donors with fully two million times her net worth, and then somehow bowl them over with her vision, and, more than once, talk them into putting two million dollars into the organization.

She was so competent and well-loved on Josh's Board that she was on the losing side of votes on the Board exactly never. She wormed her way even into the heart of old Horatio Xiu, Josh's mentor from his time at CalTech who had set him on his way over a decade ago. Horatio used three words to say what took most people twenty, and he held himself aloof from just about everyone but his own wife, and Josh, whom he treated as a son. And then—Gabi. Gabi, for whom he calmly pulled out a chair one afternoon when she stumbled into a special session slightly drunk, slid a glass of water her way, and then froze the mildly scandalized expressions on the faces of the rest of the Board with a single quelling glance and the words, "Let's give Gabriella a moment."

Gabi charmed local property owners into selling prime real estate to Josh at a discount, and bamboozled major grocers and local co-ops alike into donating food and putting donation boxes at their registers. She ran community forums to help integrate the CHEF sites into neighborhoods, made deals with food banks, built the program up to aid nursing homes and school lunch initiatives, designed logos and pitched slogans and browbeat Josh's web development team into making them work. She spent a lot of time arguing with city council members. And above all, she came to know all the participants personally. After all, she cooked with them.

And she cooked, and she cooked, and she cooked.

And she held down her job at the diner, somehow.

So when it was creeping on toward time for Gabi's disaster of a Halloween boyfriend—at her level of thematic success, the man might actually be a ghost—Josh decided to intervene. Again. He cornered her at the diner one afternoon on his way out the door.

"You have to accept a position—a paid position—with CHEF. Executive director."

"Listen, I'm not that great at spelling, but if you need me to skywrite the words 'I'M NOT WORKING FOR YOU JOSH' in order to get the message…."

"Well. Technically—"

"No! No technicalities! I won't do it again. It's—I can't. She stared at him, her oceanic eyes wide and enreating. "I can't."

Josh allowed himself to feel wounded. "Gabi. This is not a charitable offer. You've raised as much as the Board would pay you this year in the last week."

Her jaw dropped. "The Board would pay me eight hundred thousand dollars?"

"No. They wouldn't. That's my point. You're out-earning your own salary at the most extraordinary rate imaginable. And in that way and a dozen others, you're already doing the job. You'd have just as much autonomy—you know you and Horatio run the Board even if I chair it, right? You wouldn't lose anything. Except this deadend job."

"I got promoted to short order cook," she said weakly.

"Congratulations. Now get promoted to executive director of a multimillion dollar non-profit organization that's building a more just city and county."

She closed her eyes as she spoke the next time. "No."

"OK." Josh mulled over his next move for a moment, pushed some fries around on his plate. "Then—I'll step down from the Board."

"Josh—no!" Her hand hit the table with a thud, followed by the clatter of the dishes all along the counter. "This is your dream. Your idea. Your money, your connections—your research, your values—made it all possible. You're not stepping down. Or—if you do, I will."

Josh let that settle in his chest for just a moment. Horatio, whom Josh had been talking to in lieu of therapy, had a technique for dealing with unsolveable problems. Just tie them to a balloon and picture them floating away. They'll come back to Earth when they are ready to be solved. Josh tied Gabi's job to a balloon, let it hover above him in the sky. "You coming by tonight for Phyl and Horatio's anniversary party?"

"Yep. Phyl wants brownies and not cake, but a party without cake… I compromised. You'll see."

"Can't wait."

He could. He wasn't waiting for Gabi. But he found, lately, that his patience was growing and growing.

She stopped him in the doorway. "Josh. It means a lot to me—not working for you. It means a lot that you're letting it go."

He could hear her. Let it go, she was saying.

So he just nodded, glanced up at the balloon out of the corner of his mind's eye. And walked on.