B

neighborhood—to look ahead and overcome. And I had. I’d scored myself two
Ivy League degrees. I had a seat at the table at Sidley & Austin. I’d made my
parents and grandparents proud. But listening to Barack, I began to understand
that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself
out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the
place itself unstuck.

I was gripped all over again by a sense of how special he was. Slowly, all
around me, too, the church ladies began nodding their approval, punctuating his
sentences with calls of “Mmmm-hmm” and “That’s right!”

His voice climbed in intensity as he got to the end of his pitch. He wasn’t a
preacher, but he was definitely preaching something—a vision. He was making a
bid for our investment. The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you
work for change. “What’s better for us?” Barack called to the people gathered in
the room. “Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it
should be?”

It was a phrase borrowed from a book he’d read when he first started out as
an organizer, and it would stay with me for years. It was as close as I’d come to
understanding what motivated Barack. The world as it should be.

Next to me, the woman with the toddler on her lap all but exploded.
“That’s right!” she bellowed, finally convinced. “Amen!”

Amen,   I   thought to  myself. Because I   was convinced,  too.

efore he returned to law school, sometime in the middle of August, Barack
told me he loved me. The feeling had flowered between us so quickly and
naturally that there was nothing especially memorable about the moment itself. I
don’t recall when or how exactly it happened. It was just an articulation, tender
and meaningful, of the thing that had caught us both by surprise. Even though
we’d known each other only a couple of months, even though it was kind of
impractical, we were in love.

But now we had to navigate the more than nine hundred miles that would
separate us. Barack had two years of school left and said he hoped to settle in
Chicago when he was done. There was no expectation that I would leave my life
there in the interim. As a still-newish associate at Sidley, I understood that the
next phase of my career was critical—that my accomplishments would determine