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Like Barbara before her, Tina had the strong and fiery will that Steve needed from the people around him, whether they were his lovers or his business colleagues. Tina was unimpressed by his wealth and uninterested in his financial help. She was determined to live on her own modest means. When Steve bought her a new car, Tina was so mad at him that as she rushed to drive away from the Deer Creek parking lot, she shifted into reverse instead of drive and crashed against the building, totaling the vehicle.

Tina would try living with Steve for a while in the nearly barren Woodside mansion but she wasn’t happy there. When she told Heidi Roizen that she had moved out once again, Heidi asked why.

“Because I’m tired of living in a house with no furniture,” Tina said. She had lived there for a year without even a living-room couch, but Steve wouldn’t let her buy furniture.

Tina was young and artistic and intelligent, if not “superintelligent,” but she didn’t share Steve’s ambitiousness. “Tina wasn’t hard-driving at all,” recalls Heidi Roizen. “She was smart, but it wasn’t connected in a directed way. Tina would work capably on things but she didn’t have a CEO mentality.” She was lax enough that she was surprised when Pacific Bell disconnected her phone because she hadn’t paid the bill. She was also a gentle idealistic soul. While Steve worked on Next, she volunteered to help people with mental disabilities. She was a hippie chick, like Chris-Ann, and an industry insider, like Barbara.

• • •

WHILE HE WAS PURSUING his romance with Tina, he was also getting to know two other women who would become vitally important to his life: his sister and his daughter.

In the early 1980s, Steve finally discovered his biological family, whose identity had always been a mystery to him. He found that his mother, Joanne Simpson, had been a speech therapist in Green Bay, Wisconsin. His father was a political science professor of Middle Eastern heritage. Steve was born out of wedlock in 1955, and they immediately put him up for adoption. Within two and a half years, though, they had married and Joanne had given birth to a daughter, Mona Simpson, whom she kept and raised.

When Steve met his sister in the early 1980s, she was living in Manhattan and beginning a career as a novelist. She studied fiction writing in the prestigious Masters of Fine Arts program at Columbia University and worked as an editorial assistant for The Paris Review while she completed her first novel, Anywhere But Here. It was the story of the relationship between a quirky, egotistical mother and her teenage daughter as they move to Los Angeles and build a new life without the father. The novel was funny, emotional, acutely observed, gracefully written, and transparently autobiographical.

“My sister’s a writer!” Steve exclaimed to Elizabeth Holmes with the utmost delight, as if he had found genetic confirmation for his own innate artistry and specialness. He was thrilled that Mona was in so many ways a reflection of himself: extraordinarily intelligent, driven, creative, and intense. They even looked very much alike, both lean and angular and dark-haired. It was a little like a feature that ran every month in Spy magazine, called “Separated At Birth,” that matched photos of two celebrities to reveal an unexpected resemblance. The difference was that Steve and Mona really were separated at birth.

Steve had never gotten along that well or felt particularly close to his younger sister Patti, who was also adopted. Paul and Clara Jobs had wanted children so much that they adopted two of them, and as parents they were unfailingly loving, supportive, and self-sacrificing. They even let their college-dropout son take over their small house for his screwy idea of starting a company. They were good people, earnest and hardworking, but they weren’t intellectuals or artists (and neither was Patti). Steve returned their love and accepted them as his “real” parents, but he had always been deeply troubled by the fact of his adoption, the mystery of why he was abandoned.