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choice I’d ever made. This time, though, she gave me a wry, sideways look, hit
her turn signal to get us off the highway and back to our neighborhood, and
chuckled just a little. “If you’re asking me,” she said, “I say make the money first
and worry about your happiness later.”

here are truths we face and truths we ignore. I spent the next six months
quietly trying to empower myself without making any sort of abrupt change. At
work, I met with the partner in charge of my division, asking to be given more
challenging assignments. I tried to focus on the projects I found most meaningful,
including my efforts to recruit a new and more diverse crop of summer associates.
All the while, I kept an eye on job listings in the newspaper and did my best to
network with more people who weren’t lawyers. One way or another, I figured
I’d work myself toward some version of feeling whole.

At home on Euclid Avenue, I felt powerless in the face of a new reality. My
father’s feet had started to swell for no obvious reason. His skin looked strangely
mottled and dark. Anytime I asked how he was feeling, though, he gave me the
same answer, with the same degree of insistence that he’d given me for years.

“I’m fine,” he’d say, as if the question were never worth asking. He’d then
change the subject.

It was winter again in Chicago. I woke in the mornings to the sound of the
neighbors chipping ice from their windshields on the street. The wind blew and
the snow piled up. The sun stayed wan and weak. Through my office window
on the forty-seventh floor at Sidley, I looked out at a tundra of gray ice on Lake
Michigan and a gunmetal sky above. I wore my wool and hoped for a thaw. In
the Midwest, as I’ve mentioned, winter is an exercise in waiting—for relief, for a
bird to sing, for the first purple crocus to push up through the snow. You have
no choice in the meantime but to pep-talk yourself through.

My dad hadn’t lost his jovial good humor. Craig came by for family dinners
once in a while, and we sat around the table and laughed the same as always,
though we were now joined by Janis, Craig’s wife. Janis was happy and hard-
driving, a telecommunications analyst who worked downtown and was, like
everyone else, completely smitten with my dad. Craig, meanwhile, was a poster
child for the post-Princeton urban-professional dream. He was getting an MBA
and had a job as a vice president at Continental Bank, and he and Janis had