“I need something to do. My own love life is so normal. Isn’t it better to take an interest in other people’s relationships than look for reasons to mess up my own?”

“Have you considered simply enjoying the normality of your own life while simultaneously staying out of the lives of others?” asked Luisa.

“I know that’s what I’m supposed to do, but I have all of this free emotional energy that I used to expend on maintaining my neuroses, and now I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Rach, don’t take this the wrong way, but you haven’t exactly perfected normal yet.”

Hilary was hardly in a position to be evaluating who was and who wasn’t normal. “It took a while, but I’m totally normal at relationships now,” I told her, trying not to sound defensive.

“Of course you are,” said Luisa, but her own voice held a note of skepticism.

“While we’re talking about normal, I still wouldn’t describe him as such, but our old friend Iggie looks a lot better than when he lived across the hall from us sophomore year,” said Hilary. “He’s almost attractive, in a revenge-of-the-nerds type of way.”

“Huge piles of money will do that for a guy,” I said, glad of the change in topic from my relative normality to somebody else’s.

“Will he really be worth that much, Rachel?” asked Luisa.

“That’s how things are shaping up.” Winslow, Brown, the investment bank where I worked, was competing with several other firms to handle the initial public offering-IPO-of Igobe, an Internet company founded by our former classmate, Igor “Iggie” Behrenz. Iggie had been the quintessential computer geek in college, except instead of being shy and dorky he’d been arrogant and dorky, so confident in his future success that he was frequently unbearable. He hadn’t changed much since then, but I was still repairing the damage from a minor misunderstanding in which I’d ended up as the lead suspect in my boss’s murder. Winning his IPO business offered a chance to shore up my position at the office, however unbearable Iggie might be. Our pitch was conveniently scheduled for Tuesday morning at Igobe’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, and I’d invited him to the party tonight hoping it would improve our odds. “Iggie’s stake will be close to a billion dollars when his company goes public,” I told my friends.

Hilary whistled. Her admirer below turned to look, wondering if she was belatedly returning his show of appreciation, but her thoughts were somewhere else entirely. “A billion? As in a one with nine zeros after it?”

“That’s obscene,” said Luisa. Her family practically owned a small South American country, but even their fortune seemed modest in comparison.

I worked in an industry where the net worth of the top performers regularly topped the hundred-million mark, but I had to agree: a billion did seem excessive. “Everyone’s looking for the next MySpace or YouTube, and a lot of people think Iggie’s got it,” I said. “This IPO should be the hottest deal of the year.”

“You know the article I’m working on about the newest generation of Internet start-ups?” Hilary asked us. We nodded as if we did, but while I had a vague recollection of her mentioning a San Francisco-based assignment that dovetailed nicely with the party, I tended to lose track of what she was working on at any given moment. A freelance journalist, she jumped from topic to topic much as she jumped from man to man. “I’ve decided to make Iggie’s company the focus. It shouldn’t be hard to score an exclusive interview with Iggie, and I’ve been digging up some interesting material on Igobe.”

“What does the company do?” asked Luisa.

“It develops technology that masks people’s identities online,” I explained. “Once you download its software to your computer, your privacy is protected when you’re surfing the Web.”

“Which means you can visit all the porn sites you want and nobody will ever know,” translated Hilary.

“Isn’t that a relief,” said Luisa dryly.

“A lot of people seem to think so,” I said. “And they’re going to make Iggie a very rich man.”

“I only remember him as the geek who was handy to have around whenever that evil bomb icon popped up on my Mac,” said Luisa.

“Well, he’s still a geek, but he’s a billion times handier now,” said Hilary, her smile mischievous. “And he might just come in handy tonight.”

“Why do I have a feeling I don’t want to know what you’re plotting?” I asked.

“Plotting?” she asked with mock innocence. “Moi?”

“You’re incorrigible,” said Luisa, something she’d said to Hilary on more occasions than any of us could remember.

“And that’s why you love me,” she replied easily.

“Oh, is that why?” asked Luisa, but she was laughing.

“I knew there had to be a reason,” I said, but I was laughing, too.

A gust of frosty air rose up from the Bay just then, and we all shivered in our lightweight summer dresses. “We should get back to the party,” I said. “It’s freezing out here, and Peter’s probably wondering where I am.”

“And Ben’s probably wondering where you are, Hilary,” said Luisa pointedly.

“Probably,” said Hilary, but the mischievous smile was still there. “More importantly, I promised Iggie a dance.”

The Forrests’ house was a three-story Victorian, painted pale yellow with glossy white gingerbread trim. It looked a lot like the house in Party of Five, which was rumored to be nearby-not that Peter or his parents had any idea what I was talking about when I asked. Still, I’d found myself half-expecting to run into Bailey or Charlie ever since we’d arrived the previous day, and Hilary and I debated the relative merits of the Salinger men on the walk back to the party. “Don’t forget Griffin,” she said. “Not a Salinger, but still hot.”

“As if I could forget Griffin,” I said.

“Who could forget Griffin?” said Luisa, but she was teasing us-she’d never seen even a single Party of Five episode. Except for college and law school, she’d lived most of her life on another continent, privy only to a sadly limited selection of high-quality American television. This didn’t bother her-I guessed it was hard to miss something unless you knew what you were missing, and sometimes I thought being culturally illiterate might have its advantages. I worried about the amount of space TV characters and plotlines occupied in my brain, not to mention the lyrics from eighties pop songs, especially when I was unable to remember other very basic things, like pretty much everything I learned in high school.

The party was in full swing when we slipped back in through the side door, with people chatting and mingling as they balanced drinks and plates of food from the buffet in the dining room. Peter and I hadn’t yet set a date for the wedding, but his parents had insisted on throwing us an engagement party in his hometown, particularly since we would likely get married in Ohio, where I grew up, or in New York, where we lived. Their idea of a “little” party was turning out to be good practice for a big wedding-they had a wide circle of friends, and over a hundred of them were here tonight. This didn’t even include the friends Peter and I had invited or the members of my family the Forrests had urged to make the trip west.

Fortunately, nobody seemed to have noticed our brief absence. Peter’s grandmother and my grandmother were exactly where they’d been fifteen minutes ago, seated together in the den and poring over old photo albums, each probably calculating whose family had more dominant genes, and Peter’s parents were busily introducing my parents to their friends. No mediation on my part seemed necessary, but there was too much fodder for embarrassment lurking in my childhood for me to be entirely comfortable with extended interfamily mingling.

We made our way to the rear of the house, where French doors opened out onto the deck and yard. A tent and a temporary dance floor had been spread over the grass and a band played a mix of songs from both the elder Forrests’ generation and our own. Either way, most of the “younger set,” as Susan Forrest put it, seemed to have gravitated toward the music. That might also have had something to do with the fact that the line at the bar was shorter here.