The company owned this building outright, she said, so there was potential revenue there, too, although they didn’t charge a powerhouse rent to half their tenants because they wanted "the benefit of serendipity," which I took to mean that having young programmers floating around the hallways and coffee spaces gossiping and one-upping with the originators of nascent fashion labels, toymakers, microbrewers and architects produced a miniature version of the cultural and commercial stew that has been so successful in Silicon Valley. Annabel—Annie—said yes, exactly. This year, the Fire Judges had shared in the success of a new kind of ergonomic chair and a mesh-networked child-tracking system. I did not know what the second one of these might be, but Annie said it was simple yet very clever, and this combination of virtues appealed to me just as it obviously pleased her. I saw her glance over my shoulder at Colson, now happily unscrewing something with many wires and arguing over it with a boyish man in dungarees, and thought that he pleased her, too, and for the same reason. Simple but clever: it’s a good pairing in a lover. Complication and angst are much beloved of the authors of romantic fiction, who take their cues from Byron and Tolstoy, but in real life a little simplicity can be welcome, along with kindness. I thought I should pass this immense wisdom along to Annie, and then acknowledged that, if she liked Colson, she already had it.