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“Seriously,” his mother says. “And she’d be the first person to tell you she isn’t the smartest office manager in America. That isn’t why.” She looks at me. “She didn’t get there because she knew more than everybody else. She got there because she figured out how to help one person, and then she figured out how to get that same help to ten thousand people without driving to every one of their offices on a Saturday.”

I’m holding my cookie and not eating it.

I’ve been thinking about the cap like a wall around me. Like the only way past it was more of me, faster, longer, later at night. I hadn’t thought about the help being the thing that could travel without me.

Mrs. Waleska holds out her hand for the pen. I give it to her. She leans over and writes on my page, small and neat and slanted:

HELP ONE > LEARN > SYSTEMIZE > HELP MANY.

She hands the pen back.

“But nobody buys it if they don’t know it exists,” she says. “That’s the part people skip. You can have the best thing in the world and nobody comes. You need people to know you’re there, and understand why it’s for them, and trust you, and believe it’ll actually do what you say.”

“Marketing,” I say.

“Marketing.” She says it without the face people usually make. “Everybody thinks marketing means tricking somebody into buying something they don’t need. Good marketing is making the right person understand that you can fix a problem they already have.”

“What problems?”

It comes out fast. I want the list. I want her to just give me a list. I want to have her brain, actually.

She laughs at me, not unkindly.

“There are a million of them,” she says. “But if you squint, most of the businesses that last are selling one of about three things. Health. Wealth. Relationships.” She ticks them off on her fingers. “People want to look better and feel better and hurt less and sleep. People want to make more money, or keep more of it, or get promoted, or not be so scared about it. People want somebody to love them, or they want their kid to talk to them again, or they want to stop being so awkward at work parties. There are other ones. Looking important. Saving time. Being the kind of person you wish you were. But those three cover a lot of ground. And of course, there’s the entertainment industry, but that’s completely different.”

“So people pay to fix something that hurts,” I say slowly. “Or to get somewhere faster. Or to not lose something.”

“Or to become somebody,” she says. “Don’t forget that one. That one’s big.”

Then I’m asking everything at once. How do you know what people will pay for? How do you find them? How do you know if it’s a real problem or just a thing that sounds like one? How do you get somebody to trust you when they don’t know you? Rafe gets a couple in, too, practical, aimed at the sides of it: how much it costs to get one customer, whether people actually do the work or just get convinced to buy, what happens to Lorraine’s business when someone does it better.

“Then she’s in trouble,” his mother says, to that one. “Good question.”

She doesn’t answer most of the others. She turns them around.

“What are you unusually good at?” she says. “What do people come to you for help with? What do you understand better than most people your age? What could you learn well enough to teach? What would somebody pay you to make easier, or faster, or safer?”

I open my mouth and nothing comes out.

I don’t know. I don’t know any of it. I’ve been asked what I want to major in, and what I want to be, the way you ask a kid at a birthday party. I’ve never once been asked what problem I understand that other people don’t, by somebody who expected the answer to be worth money.

The not-knowing doesn’t feel bad. It’s just empty.

“So I don’t have to sell clothes,” I say, completely off topic.

“You don’t have to sell anything you can hold,” she says. Then, before I can get too excited about it, she adds, “But don’t go chasing whatever sounds easy. Easy money attracts idiots.”

Rafe huffs through his nose, almost a laugh, and looks back at the TV.

His mom brushes the crumbs off her cardigan.

“A friend of mine added me to a group, years ago,” she says. “On Facebook. It’s all people who run businesses online. I mostly just read it. I think you’d find it interesting. My laptop’s in my reading room, if you want to see.”

I’m off the couch before she’s finished the sentence.

The room is at the end of the hall in the new wing, past the linen closet, the last door before the long window that looks out over the drive. I’ve walked past it four times and thought it was a closet.

It’s small. That’s the first surprise in this house. Smaller than the guest room, smaller than Rafe’s, about the size of my dorm at Corvin. There’s one window with a cushioned seat built under it, and a deep green armchair that’s gone shiny on the arms, and a footstool with a dent in the top where somebody’s heels have rested for years. Two lamps, both low and yellow. And books on every wall, floor to ceiling, shelved two deep in places, hardcovers with the jackets gone soft and paperbacks with the spines broken white. Mystery novels next to a book about the history of salt next to three books about negotiation next to a cookbook with sticky notes coming out of it in every color.