Introduction:

I started where ambitious girls with good test scores start chemistry, physics, the kind of research that requires institutional approval and found myself, through a series of increasingly unlikely decisions, here.

An early bet on cryptocurrency when I was young means I don’t need to do this, which may be why I do it the way I do: slowly, selectively, with the kind of attention usually reserved for problems I intend to solve. I study what I’m drawn to. For a while it was markets, then mechanisms, now it’s the geometry of antique jewelry, the architecture of Edwardian dress, the way certain minerals refract light at angles that shouldn’t exist in nature.

When that attention turns to a person, it is—I’ve been told—a lot.

I am cold before I am warm. I will notice what you think you’re hiding; I will find it interesting rather than threatening; I may tease you about it later, in a way that makes you want to be caught again. The people I see over years rather than hours tend to describe something that starts as a game and becomes, against all professional advice, something less contained. I have stopped apologizing for this.

What I offer is not performance. I don’t soften my opinions or feign fascination. I’m interested in the long conversation, the one that starts over dinner and continues, in fragments, across months, where the boundaries between arrangement and affection become, eventually, irrelevant.

Perhaps you’ve found yourself here the same way I did: following a thread that didn’t make sense until it did.

You tell me where, I’ll tell you how, and when.