A/N: Thanks as always to Jan, Barbara, and Alison.

Chapter 13

March 2013

As the end of March neared, Emma was now "sleeping through the night," meaning a little under five hours at a stretch, about three nights a week. She would also usually grudgingly sleep for an hour at a time twice during the day when Lizzy put her down in her crib. It was a miracle. Lizzy could practically feel her synapses begin to re-connect as her brain gradually woke up from the deep freeze it had been in for so many months.

As Lizzy emerged from her fog, she started avidly reading the newspaper, legal blogs, and even law review articles. It was an exciting time for a legal junkie. How was the Supreme Court going to rule on same-sex marriage? What was going to happen with the Voting Rights Act? With affirmative action? These were landmark civil rights and political cases, things she cared a lot about. She also caught up on, and started following very closely, the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, and other issues related to the detention of prisoners there, things she'd worked on at HRI.

She wished she had someone to talk to about all of this. She tried explaining it all to Emma, but all she ever said in reply was "bbblllllph." She emailed her friends, but they were busy at work and couldn't reply right away. So she started reading and commenting on a blog she'd followed avidly before Emma was born. It was about "lawfare," how national security law could be used as a weapon of war. That definitely connected up with all the Guantánamo issues.

It wasn't much, but it was OK for now. Spring was finally getting ready to show its face. All those months of being confined to indoor activities would at last come to an end. The zoo, the aquarium, the beach...they were all waiting to be enjoyed! Life was good.

Will, unfortunately, wasn't faring as well, particularly when it came to dealing with Georgie. He reported to Lizzy that the family therapy was going OK, although he didn't share a lot of the details with her. Finally, nearly six weeks after Georgie had been admitted to Tranquility, she and the counselors asked Will if he would consider bringing Lizzy and Emma to one of the sessions. It was part of repairing the family, re-building the foundation of trust that had been lost over the years. He and Lizzy talked about it for a long time before they both finally agreed it was probably the right thing to do. The following Saturday, they all drove up to Tranquility. Naturally Emma screamed the whole way there, with Lizzy in the back seat trying to calm her. They managed to get her put back together just before the counseling session started.

The three of them walked together into the therapy room, a cozy, cheerful space decorated all in soothing, dusky pinks. It looked liked someone's living room, although Lizzy noticed that all the furniture and lamps were bolted down so that nobody could throw them.

Perched lightly on the edge of the central sofa seat was Georgie. She wasn't at all like the picture Lizzy had unconsciously had in her head of what a drug addict looked like. She was tall, very slender, ethereal, like some kind of unexpectedly beautiful cross between a baby giraffe and a shimmering fairy. She had big, soft clear eyes with long lashes, and wavy, romantically long dark hair with expertly executed highlights in it, understated designer clothes, no jewelry except for an engagement ring with a single giant diamond, and manicured nails. Lizzy realized that, based on a few overheard conversations, she had assumed Georgie would be a screaming harridan with a rat's nest in her hair and her arms covered in track marks. But she wasn't. In fact, she looked exactly like Will's sister should look: composed, striking, exquisitely mannered, rich. Lizzy really hoped her own surprise didn't show too much as she followed a grim Will, who was holding Emma, toward Georgie.

Georgie stood up and smiled a tentative smile. She was nearly as tall as Will. They kissed each other on the cheek and murmured words that Lizzy couldn't quite make out. Will introduced Emma to Georgie, and Georgie smiled and touched Emma's hand and said all the socially appropriate things one says to an infant. Lizzy could see Will's eyes moving back and forth between the two of them in what looked to be some kind of painful comparison. She hoped he saw what he wanted to see, and conversely found no trace of what he didn't want to see.

Lizzy stepped forward to hold out her hand and say, "Hi, Georgie, I'm Lizzy."

Georgie smiled and took her hand warmly. "I'm so glad you could come. Thank you," she murmured graciously, as though it were a cocktail party.

The counselor, a man in his mid-50s named John, came in and made sure everyone had settled in before he reminded them that the subject of discussion today was trust, how people could earn and lose trust, and how, specifically, their family could learn to trust each other enough again that they could move forward through Georgie's recovery.

Lizzy mostly just observed, although she did speak a few times when John directly asked her questions.

"What do you think, Lizzy? Can you accept Georgie back into the family with open arms?" John asked at one point.

"Look, I have no preconceptions here," Lizzy answered. "I feel like I've walked into the middle of a conversation, and I don't know what's already been said. My only concern is to keep Will from being hurt again."

In Will, she saw distress, sadness, fear and anger, all held firmly in check. She couldn't read Georgie, of course. Georgie was contrite, she apologized, she said she wanted so much to do better. But there was in her manner some kind of an edge that raised Lizzy's hackles.

John had them talk a lot about what Georgie could do to earn Will's trust back, conditions that had to be met and so on before she would get the things that she wanted from him. Once Georgie tried to steer the conversation toward how she might regain trust in Will, since he had failed to come through for her so many times in her hour of need. How could she know for sure that he wouldn't walk away from her recovery process? But John told her that was not appropriate. She, and her addiction, had forced him to apply limits, John said, and that wasn't the same thing at all as the many times she had stolen or lied or manipulated.

It went round and round like this for a couple of hours, and Lizzy wasn't exactly sure what they had accomplished at the end of the session. But John seemed satisfied, and he asked Georgie if she would like to invite anyone else for the session the following week. She said she would: her fiancé, Blake.

Lizzy heard Will groan quietly at the mention of his name, but he agreed all the same.

They hung around chatting uncomfortably with Georgie about innocuous, socially acceptable topics for a while after the session ended. Then Georgie had another appointment, so Lizzy and Will left to go get dinner before hitting the road. Lizzy didn't push him to talk about what had just happened. Then they couldn't talk in the car because of Emma's howling, and it had to wait until they were back home.

"So, what did you think of that?" Will asked as they all crashed together on the sofa in the entertainment room.

She cleared her throat. "Well, um. Ahem. How about if you start?"

He shook his head and turned to lie down with his feet up on her lap. "You first." He sat Emma on his chest.

"She's clearly very bright, um, and articulate, together. Not what I expected, I guess."

"Yup. Right. That's why I couldn't believe it for so long. Believe that she was an addict, I mean."

Lizzy thought about this for a while. "Do you think she's serious about getting well? Honestly, I couldn't tell. That whole thing about your not being trustworthy just blew my mind."

"Yeah. I think she's struggling with how much responsibility she needs to accept for the things she's done. I guess you heard, she's still sometimes thinking of herself as the only victim in all this. I'm not sure John is the one, the counselor, who can make her see it's more complicated than that. Or maybe it's that she's not ready to see yet, no matter who is running the show."

"And if she's not ready, it's not going to work, is it? The rehab?" Lizzy rubbed Emma's back where she sat on Will's lap.

Will shook his head. "No, it won't. I think Blake is the wildcard here, though. Do you remember I told you they met in the Hamptons? He was hospitalized for a long time here in the city after his last OD, and then his family sent him to Colorado for rehab, I guess to get him away from all his friends here. A luxury place up in the mountains, something like that. He just got out, and came back to New York. I met him, and, um, he talks a big game about turning his life around. The way he tells it, he hit rock bottom and he's looking for a way out. She seems really attached to him. I think the question is whether he's going to pull her up, or she's going to pull him down. Or, maybe, whether they'll pull each other down."

"Hmm, sort of like, can she change for love?"

"Right. People can't do that, in my experience," he said, tickling Emma's foot. Emma laughed but Will's expression was glum.

Lizzy shot him a look that said, really?

He gave her a half-hearted, lopsided smile back. "OK, but only if they're ready to change, anyway."

"What's Blake like? I mean, why the negative reaction when John asked if he could come to therapy?"

"He's a Leland, you know, turn-of-the-century steel money. Not stupid. Failed out of...Bowdoin, maybe? Because of drugs. He just has this, I don't know, this manner that feels kind of, um...sociopathic, is I guess what I'd call it."

"Aha, a 100% boundary-free individual, eh?" Lizzy joked. But she realized that that kind of feeling was probably what had set her off about Georgie, too.

Will chuckled in agreement, which was probably about as close to a laugh as he was going to get today.

He went on, "I know she's manipulative, and I get the feeling he is, too. I don't know what she wants. Is she running some kind of con? I can't figure out what it is, if so. In six years, when she's 35, she gets full control of the last part of her trust fund. There's nothing we can do to make that happen faster."

Lizzy was shocked by this. "You mean her money is in trust till she turns 35? She has no control of her money till she's 35? And you got yours right away. That's incredible. How infantilizing."

"Yeah, I know. It's the terms of the family trust from my great-grandparents, different rules for girls and boys. I'm the executor because I'm the oldest male child."

Lizzy grimaced at that. Damn nineteenth-century sexism extending its cold, dead hand from the grave. She wondered if they'd be able to change the terms of the trust for Emma.

She asked, "But Blake still has access to his family money, right? That's why the big rock on her finger, and the fancy clothes and stuff?"

"Yeah, I guess. I know she sold all the family jewelry she had, and all her other nice things, for drugs a long time ago. Probably that's why she's asking for more money from the family trust."

Lizzy thought about this for a while. "Well...what if actually everything is exactly as it seems, and there's nothing bigger going on here?" she asked.

"Right. That's exactly the problem, why we were talking about trust today. She's lied so many times that I don't know if I could believe this was all legit even if it totally and completely was."

Lizzy stroked his leg. She didn't know what to say, so she didn't say anything.

Will held Emma up in front of his face so he could gaze into her eyes. "Georgie looked so much like Emma when she was little." Lizzy had seen photos of Georgie, and actually she thought they didn't look much alike except insofar as they were both human babies, but she kept her mouth shut. "So much wasted promise. How do we keep Emma from turning out like that?"

Oh, so that's what some of this was about. Poor Will.

A catch in her voice, she said, "Sweetheart, Emma is not Georgie, OK? We're already doing things really differently from how your parents did them. We're going to be there for her. We already are. We're going to do everything we know how to do to make her happy and healthy, and then we're going to hope for the best. That's all we can do."

"You're right, I know."

They sat in silence for a while longer. Suddenly, Will said, "I just screwed things up so badly with Georgie, and I don't want to do the same thing with Emma."

In shock, Lizzy blurted, "What?! Do not let her get into your head like that. All of this is not your fault. She kept right on making bad choices for a long, long time after she was already an adult."

He looked doubtful. She wasn't having any of it.

"Really, you have to stop doing that, blaming yourself. You are a good father. You have been a good brother. You have always tried to do your best by her. You have to let it go. It's like you said, she has to take responsibility for her behavior, she has to make amends, not you." She paused and looked at him. He looked so, so sad.

Her voice full of empathy, she continued, "If this is too much for you, if it's too hard, you don't have to go to the therapy sessions anymore. You can let the lawyers handle everything, let them do what they're required to legally. You can walk away, if that's what you need to do for your own mental health."

"I know." He kissed Emma's hair. "But she's my sister." And that was, of course, the heart of the matter.

So he kept going to the sessions, driving to Connecticut every Saturday, watching in perplexity as events there unfolded.

Later that week, at one of her Wednesday mothers' group meetings at the community center, Lizzy ran unexpectedly into an old friend. It was Stacy, who several years before had been a member of the women lawyers support group—until she had had a baby, stopped coming to the group, and then dropped out of the law altogether. Now she had a toddler and an infant. She and Lizzy hadn't seen each other for a couple of years now.

"I don't know what I was thinking," said Stacy, sitting down on the rubber play mat on the floor next to her toddler daughter, who was playing with blocks. "I should have had a nanny from the start instead of trying daycare. The firm said it was family-friendly, though, so I thought maybe it would work out. Big mistake. And when I found out I was pregnant again, and Jim started traveling three weeks a month for work...Well, I just couldn't take it anymore, so I quit." She shifted her baby boy to her other arm.

"Yeah, I can understand that," said Lizzy, sitting down next to her and helping Emma sit up on the mat. "And you were working a lot of hours."

"It just wasn't doable."

"Are you thinking of going back at some point? Or are you happy with things as they are now?" Lizzy handed Emma a plastic block to see if she would do anything with it besides chew on it.

"I don't know. It sure doesn't seem feasible to go back with the little one here. And, maybe we'll have another, who knows. Anyway, I'm just not sure we could try to juggle a second career while Jim is traveling so much."

"What exactly is he doing now?" Lizzy asked.

"Still management consulting." She named the firm her husband worked for, one of the biggest consulting firms in the country. "He's mostly doing stuff in the healthcare sector, and there's lots to do gearing up for the Affordable Care Act, all over the country. They have these months-long projects and sometimes he doesn't even get home on weekends if the site is too far away."

"Wow, that's rough. How do you get by?"

"A part-time nanny, and my mom lives in Greenwich, so we go stay with her a lot. There are some other moms in our building and we help each other out." Lizzy thought that must be nice, to have nearby family who weren't nutcases and other moms in the building. Of course she was just assuming that Stacy's mother wasn't a nutcase.

"Actually," said Stacy, "you might like those moms and some other ones that we get together with. They're all Ivy League grads, and, you know, MBAs and JDs. Maybe you'd like to meet up with us? We have a standing playdate at Martha's on Tuesday mornings." Martha's was a café on the Upper West Side specializing in brunch and known for being child-friendly. That meant it had organic peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches on organic whole wheat bread and a play area for young kids, and eggs benedict and mimosas for the parents.

"Yeah, sure. That sounds great," said Lizzy. She liked Stacy. Maybe she could learn a thing or two from those other moms, too, moms who were all in the same boat as her.

The next week, Lizzy and Emma made their way into Martha's café and quickly found Stacy and the five other women in her group. Their toddlers were playing in the play area, and three infants were in their strollers and carseats next to the moms. Only Lizzy held her baby in a carrier on her chest. Stacy did the introductions and offered to order her a drink.

"Do you want a mimosa? Kate and Megan aren't nursing anymore so they're partaking."

"Thanks, I can't, nursing," said Lizzy, not that she would have had a mimosa at 10 o'clock on a Tuesday morning anyway. "So, Stacy says you're all refugees from law and business, like me?"

Megan, a redhead with her hair in a professional-looking bun and fancy French nails, raised her mimosa glass in salute and said, "You bet! Met my husband at HBS. Left Portman & Caldwell when my second was born." HBS was Harvard Business School, and Portman & Caldwell was a big marketing firm.

Kate chimed in, "Stanford Law," and the others mentioned Wharton, Kellogg, and Sloan, the top business and law schools in the country. Stacy's degree was from Harvard Law School, Lizzy knew. They were all upfront about the fact that none of them had any plans to go back to work, ever. Their husbands' jobs took them away from home too much, they said, or it was too hard to coordinate their working lives, or they didn't like being away from their children as much as they had to in the jobs they had been trained to do. And, money was no object.

Megan turned and froze Lizzy with a sharp, penetrating look. "So, where do you have her on the list for preschool?"

"Um, the one at Renwick Academy." Getting Emma on the list was one of the first things she and Will had done once they'd entered the second trimester of pregnancy.

"Oh, really? That place is really old school, I hear. Do you know for sure she'll get in? My older daughter is at The Abbey School. That's the really hot place nowadays. We were lucky to get her in there, since she started out on the waiting list even though we applied when I was ten weeks pregnant, can you believe it? My husband went to Princeton with the admissions director," she confided in a lower voice, "otherwise there was no chance of her getting in. But, they give preference to siblings, so that means Olivia, here," she nodded toward her daughter in the play area, "is in, too."

The other women mentioned the very exclusive preschools that their children were in or would be starting soon. Kate said she and her husband had sent in her son's application for preschool even before he was conceived, otherwise he would never have gotten into the very elite program where he would start the next year.

"Wow, I had no idea it was so competitive," said Lizzy. Of course she knew about the difficulties of getting into selective colleges, but this stuff about elementary school and preschool was beyond her. She'd never even heard of any of these places before. How the hell had she ever managed to get into Columbia, coming out of the Artemis public school system?

"Oh, yeah," said Stacy. "If you want your kid to have a shot at a good prep school, and then a top boarding school, you have to start out at one of these preschools. Otherwise, you can just kiss Harvard or Yale goodbye. Even being a legacy isn't a total lock there anymore, you know."

Lizzy supposed that that was because they occasionally let in rabble like herself now. Still, if this was what it took for kids from Will's, and now her, socioeconomic background to get into a top college, then maybe she'd better start paying attention to all this stuff. "Hmm. I guess we, Will and I, never really talked about that too much because he had his heart set on Renwick. He and his sister went there."

"Oh, right," said Stacy. "So I guess Emma's in for sure."

Megan looked at her inquiringly.

"Her husband is Will Darcy, you know, one of the Fitzwilliam cousins. They all go to Renwick."

The women all nodded and murmured, "Right, right." How did they know that? wondered Lizzy.

One of the MBAs, Sharon, started talking about her older child, who was in third grade at a very posh elementary school on the Upper East Side with a lot of politicians' and celebrities' kids. "I'm really worried about him," Sharon said. "He's a very good student. He gets excellent grades. But I'm not sure if he's doing enough extracurriculars. The kind of portfolio he has right now is just not going to get him into an elite high school."

Lizzy thought, extracurriculars for a third grader? What is that? Mudpie-making or something? A portfolio?

Kate nodded her head sympathetically. "I know. Being well-rounded is so important to the admissions officers these days. He does tae kwon do, right? And he plays the violin, and volunteers with you at the soup kitchen? That's all good."

"You'd think so, right?" Sharon threw her hands up in the air in exasperation. "But the educational consultant at our school said at a meeting we had last week that the kids also need to make some kind of important contribution, you know, start their own NGO for needy children in the Third World, or maybe found their own socially conscious Internet business or something. Something big that really sets them apart from the other kids, gets attention in the admissions office."

"Yeah, that's true," said Megan. "Maybe you can sit down with him and talk about his interests, find a niche of some kind, and then work up a business plan. If you're too busy with the little one, I could set you up with a friend of mine who does some freelancing in business development with child entrepreneurs. She started with her own son, you know, for a school project, and then started selling her services. She's great."

"Thanks, yeah, if you could text me her info," Sharon replied.

Lizzy listened in horrified fascination.

That evening as Lizzy and Will hung out in the living room playing with Emma on the carpet, she told him about the playdate, which had lasted for about four very, very intense hours.

"You should have seen it. The entire time, they were strategizing about how they were going to get their kids into Harvard, and turn them into these successful clones of themselves, top-notch professionals and people who are going to contribute to the world in these super meaningful ways. I mean, the table was practically pulsating with brain power, right? And they're focusing this laser beam of intellect and ambition and drive and cutting analysis right there on their children. I half expected one of the kids to just, poof, go up in smoke."

"Well, that's what they know how to do, right? Make a plan and carry it out successfully." Will lay on his back and held Emma up over his chest, in Supergirl flying position. She obliged by drooling on his shirt.

Lizzy reached for a tissue from the side table and wiped off the drool. "Yeah, only the plan isn't a marketing strategy, or business development, or a legal case, it's the kid. They're, like, controlling every aspect of these kids' lives. Honestly, it really kind of freaked me out."

"Why's that? You know a lot of women who are driven like that, don't you?" He hoisted Emma up and down like he was lifting weights. She laughed and giggled.

"Because—" Lizzy hesitated, tissue in hand. "One, because shouldn't the kids have some freedom of choice? Not have their every move choreographed by mom? Have their own ambitions and plans? And two, because—" She stopped again.

"What?" Now Will sat up and held Emma in his lap.

Lizzy shoved the tissue into her pocket, looked down at the white carpet and picked at it with her fingers. "Because I can imagine myself doing exactly the same thing if I don't have some other kind of project to channel my energy and ambition into," she said in a small voice.

Will leaned back a little, a wry smile creeping over his face. "Aha. Aha. Now we're onto something, I think."

"Yeah, go ahead and laugh. You know it's true. Women have been trying to achieve things through their children forever, when there wasn't any way to pursue them directly. But it's like...these women have all the tools, all the degrees, all the opportunity to do it on their own behalf, and they're not doing it. It's back on their kids, again, like in the bad old days."

"But from what you said before, you could understand why they left their careers, right? It was just too hard to manage two careers."

"Yes, I do understand. I'm doing the same thing, right? But at the same time, it's like we're all acting out those old questions about whether it's worth it to educate women. Like, why educate them at all when they're just going to quit and have babies?" she asked in a growly old man voice. "It's just a waste of human capital. It's like we're setting out to show that Rousseau was right, the only significant thing a woman can do with her education is to raise the next generation of men to be good citizens and leaders. Only these women—we—are raising our daughters to do it, too, or maybe to get the education and then 'retire,' too. It's so frustrating!"

"Well, I don't know about what Rousseau said. I've definitely heard the human capital argument, of course, as a way to justify not hiring women. I don't buy it, of course. But anyway, if this works for them, if it's what they want to do, isn't that OK? Isn't that what you want, for women to do what they want to do?"

"Yes, of course," sighed Lizzy, her frustration subsiding. She scooted back and slumped a little against the front of the sofa. "And raising children is incredibly important. Obviously I think that, or I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing."

"Yeah, clearly."

Lizzy drew spirals in the carpet for a few moments before she looked up at Will and Emma.

"I don't want to be like them, and it would be so, so easy for me to be like that with Emma. I could feel myself getting sucked in a little today. I think it would make both of us crazy. And a crazy mom is a bad mom."

"I'm sure you could figure out, you know, how to give her a longer leash or whatever." Will put Emma on her belly on the floor and watched her inch herself forward as if she were swimming. "See, she's striking out on her own here pretty well already."

"I don't know. I need to think about this. Whether I can really shut off the ambition. That's one of my limitations as a person."

Will looked at her sharply and asked, "Who said you have to shut it off? Things don't have to be like this forever. You don't have to stay home forever. Nobody ever said that."

"True, true. Oh, jeez, did you hear that? Ugh, again. Let's get her changed and into the bath."

As the days passed and she felt increasingly more alert, Lizzy started to miss aspects of her old life more and more. She wouldn't give up the time she'd had with Emma for anything, and in fact she was greedy for more of it. But the part of her brain that had been overwhelmed by lack of sleep and mothering instincts was starting to reassert itself, to want some attention. Lizzy realized she was starting to get the itch again, the itch to get back to the law. But what could she do?

Emma was still so little. There was no way Lizzy was going back to a position like the one she'd had at HRI, with all those hours and all that travel, those court dates she couldn't miss or the whole case would go to hell. Or, God forbid, the corporate law position she'd had at DeWitt back in the day. The part-time legal work she'd heard of was something like a small firm doing family and estate law. That wasn't the direction she wanted to go. In-house corporate counsel? Maybe, but it wouldn't get her back on the same track she'd been on. Maybe part-time at a legal defense fund of some kind? She'd think about that. How could she do the kind of work she loved, with hours she could withstand, and still keep doors open for the future if she wanted to go back to a more demanding career? Was it even possible? She needed some advice if she wanted to get serious about this.

She sent out messages to her network of Yale classmates and former SCOTUS clerks, and called up her law school mentor, Professor Leah Hoffman. Prof. Hoffman didn't have kids of her own, but Lizzy knew that she understood the dilemmas of parenthood. She also kept in good touch with her former students and had a good idea of what was going on in the profession as a result.

Lizzy eventually got through to her, and promised not to take too much time from her busy schedule. She explained the circumstances of her departure from HRI, and said she was trying to figure out where she could go from here.

"Yeah, I know, it's tough," said Prof. Hoffman. "If you're thinking of getting back into it, it's good you're not waiting too long. The longer you're out, the harder it is to get back on the elite track that a superstar like you belongs on."

Lizzy was a little flustered by the compliment. "Oh, well, right, I hear it's hard to get back in, yes. But, back in what capacity is what I'm wondering."

"You're right, it's an unforgiving profession. And I think we're going to keep on hemorrhaging women until some things change."

"So, from your vantage point, where you see what women, mothers, are doing in the law, how—I mean, are there any options that are relatively flexible, but don't disqualify you from advancement? You know, in public service, for instance?"

Prof. Hoffman sighed. "Not much, I'm afraid. Corporate is out. High-profile anything is really out. One thing that maybe you could consider—and I don't know if this appeals at all—is academia."

"Yeah, President Obama taught at Chicago, right? Before he went into politics. Proof it doesn't disqualify you for advancement, I guess!"

"Well, if you're interested, you have some time to get ready for the fall hiring season. It's cyclical—recruitment for tenure-track positions is in September and October for positions beginning the following academic year. Your résumé would need to go out in early August."

"What would I need to be an attractive candidate?"

"With your qualifications and experience, I think publishing a couple of law review articles should do it."

"Hmm. I co-wrote one with a colleague while I was at HRI. So, another, maybe?"

"Yes. Aim high, and think big. I know you always do."

Lizzy did more research and thought about it for a couple of days. She'd never seriously considered teaching before, even though she'd guest lectured a couple of times at NYU. But the more she thought about it the more appealing it seemed. She had loved law school, the arguments and questioning and big concepts. How great would it be if she could communicate all that to up-and-coming new lawyers? She also had really enjoyed the time she had spent working on the law review article, and the thought of continuing to devote some of her time to that was very attractive. It was a tough and uncertain job market, though, and she had reservations about committing herself to anything just yet.

Finally she brought it up with Will. One evening they talked about it from the time he got home to the time they went to bed. Could they make it work? What would have to change to make it feasible? Would she be ready to leave Emma more often in a year and a half? What would Emma be like, and what would she need, so far in the future? Could they even imagine what such a new life might be like? In the end, they decided that the best thing to do might be for her to start down that path—begin working on a law review article—and see how it felt in the fall when the recruitment season was upon them.

A couple of days later, Will came home with a new laptop for her. He had asked Ahmed to have it all set up with subscriptions to Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law—all the databases she would need to get access to the latest legal thinking for her research. What a sweet man.

And so Lizzy changed how she used her afternoons off from Emma duty. Rather than always exercising in the home gym, or reading a novel, or taking a nap, which she needed less and less anyway, she started researching and writing the article. While she'd been working at HRI on the Guantánamo cases, she'd thought she'd found a novel way to attack the state secrets doctrine that kept so many of the government's programs and legal rationales, the ones that impinged on human rights most severely, hidden. But she'd never had a chance to think it through completely before she had quit. So now she started working on it in earnest.

The authors on the lawfare blog liked some of her comments, and saw where she was heading with her arguments. They invited her to start contributing to the site. She started writing blog posts that helped her think through her ideas with the help of the sharp minds she encountered there.

It was really weird to spend the afternoon in her home office thinking and writing about horrible things like torture and extradition to third countries for the purposes of carrying it out, or pondering legal minutiae about state secrets, and then to emerge, blinking, into the bright, happy living room where Emma and Elena awaited her. But it was also a great relief. And sometimes, she realized, so was walking back into her office to sit down for a good think.

The last week in March, Ahmed started his parental leave. He and Phil flew to Los Angeles, where they were in the delivery room while their daughter, Ava, was born. He sent his friends and co-workers an email, with a photo, sharing the joyful news. It was a beautiful image of Ava, him, Phil, and Ava's birth mother, with whom they had arranged an open adoption. She had told them she was, of course, sadder than sad to say goodbye to Ava, but she was also hopeful that with them, Ava would have a loving, happy home, something she herself couldn't provide.

In Ahmed's absence, Will had hired a temp, an experienced, competent, professional, well-qualified woman in her 40s, to fill in as his PA. At first he groused about having to do it. It wasn't a totally seamless transition, and a few things weren't done to his total satisfaction. But he eventually got over it. Nobody could compare to Ahmed, it seemed. Will thought Lizzy hadn't noticed that he had started a countdown, marking the weeks till Ahmed returned, on the blotter of his desk in his home office. But she knew it was there.

On a Sunday morning in early April, Will and Lizzy were sitting at the table in the breakfast nook eating bagels and lox and reading the newspaper, and Emma was sitting in her highchair banging some plastic cups around.

"Oh, God," cried Lizzy, slamming down the Styles section. "Another stupid article on a stupid study about whether kids are better off if their mothers stay home to take care of them or if their mothers have paid jobs. Enough 'mommy wars' crap already! Why don't they do some studies about whether kids are better off if their fathers stay home?"

"Maybe they can't find enough families where that happens to make a statistically valid study?" Will put down the business section. "Actually, that's not true. I'm sure they could now. Probably not ten or twenty years ago, though."

"That's probably true. But I don't see it happening much out there," she pointed outside with her chin. "It's all women deciding that two careers are just too much too handle, and so they're going to get out of the game."

Will nodded. "Yeah, I know. But I hear the men are out there, too. I actually just read a profile in the Harvard alumni magazine about a guy who did that. He gave up a successful career in banking and decided to stay home with the kids and raise chickens in the suburbs or something when his wife became chief of oncology at a hospital in Boston."

"Really? Why the profile in the alumni magazine? Ha, can you imagine what would happen if they wrote a profile about every woman who did that?"

Will looked embarrassed. "Well, when the kids got a little older, he started some kind of Internet business that transformed the world out of his home office. You know, the typical Harvard story."

Lizzy had to laugh at that. It was true. Every profile in the Harvard alumni magazine was about an alum who had transformed the world from his or her garage, home or office.

Pensively, Will continued, "You know, I've been thinking about it a little myself. It's a lot of things, kind of coming together. You do a really good job of letting me know what Emma's up to. But I don't know, I guess it was especially when I was in Europe, I just started to notice how much I was missing with her. How much I'd already missed, and how much of that I could never get back. The usual stuff. She's only going to be this little once, and all that. I already don't really remember what she was like when she was first born, except for when I look at pictures. It's just gone, and so much of it I didn't get to see at all."

Lizzy looked at him with some curiosity. Where was this heading? "Yeah, I felt that way when I first went back to work, too. I know what you mean."

"I've been thinking about that, especially about the things that I missed. And I don't want to miss so much going forward." He looked at her speculatively. "I've been thinking, what if I, well, what if I, say, took Emma for one day a week? What if I took her, say, every Friday? Would that be OK with you?"

Lizzy was astounded. She had never in a million years thought he would ever say such a thing. Was she hearing things? "Whoa. By take her, do you mean, you'd stay home with her, without Elena around?"

"Yeah."

In amazement, Lizzy sputtered, "Well, I mean, yeah, of course that's OK with me if that's what you want to do." The practicalities of it, what it would actually mean, started filling her head. "But are you sure? Could you get your job done? Would you do a four-day week with longer hours each day? You're already working 10-hour days."

"No, you're right. I'm still just tossing the idea around. I'd have to think it through. Probably I'd have to do a reorganization in the office."

"What do you mean? Fire people?" She hoped that wasn't it. No way would she want this kind of personal decision to cost anyone his or her job.

"No, no, I mean, redistribute some of the responsibilities I've been holding onto and assign them to other people. You said it before yourself, I do a lot of tasks that I don't have to do. It's the whole micromanaging thing that I inherited from my dad."

Emma started fussing and Lizzy couldn't hear Will very well over the din. She took Emma out of her highchair and nodded for Will to follow her into the living room, where all of Emma's other toys were. They paraded into the room, which was currently festooned with the parts of spring-loaded jumping chair, a Jumperoo, that Will was trying to assemble. The instruction booklet seemed to be missing a couple of vital steps.

"OK, yeah. It's always sounded like there were a lot of things you could let other people do. But, really? You can just do this if you want to? You're not worried that the place will fall apart?" Lizzy couldn't believe her ears. She put Emma on the baby gym mat and gave her some wooden keys to gnaw on. Lizzy and Will sat close together on the sofa.

"Yeah, it's my company. I have to get the board to agree, of course. I think that a couple of the VPs would be happy to take on some of the investor relations stuff, and I know for sure that Carmen wants more responsibility. She told me she did."

"Wow, well,of course, if that's what you want to do. Is that all that's going on here, missing Emma's growth? It's such a big change for you."

"Well—and Georgie, too. She had so much potential, you know, and it just all slipped away, maybe partly because I wasn't there for her. I want to make sure that doesn't happen to Emma." In response to Lizzy's protest, he said, "I know, I know. I want to, just, be there for Emma. Make sure that she knows she can count on me."

Lizzy took his hand. "I think that's a wonderful sentiment. Let's be clear, though. You're not going to be able to see everything. There are always going to be some things we both miss, no matter what we do."

"Yeah, I know. I don't think I'll get to see every school play or every field hockey game, but I'd at least like to be sure I see some of them. My dad never saw any of mine, and I won't see any at all, either, unless I change the way I'm doing things."

"Field hockey, huh?" She teased him, unable to resist. Could he have chosen anything preppier? Dressage, maybe. "She has to learn how to walk first. But seriously, of course I see what you mean. I think that's really great."

His dark eyes serious, he asked, "Are you sure? It might cut into your time with Emma. I don't want to step on your toes there."

She squeezed his hand. "What? No, of course not. You wouldn't be. We'll work it out. If you want to do it, I'm right there with you."

He let go of her hand and held out his arm to welcome her into his embrace. "Maybe it won't work out. I'll have to do some investigation, run it by the board. I don't know what they'll think about it. We've never done anything like this before."

"There's a first time for everything, right?"

But who, thought Lizzy, would ever have guessed that the first one doing it at WPD might be Will?

They sat close, his arm around her, and watched Emma grab, roll and swim on the carpet. This incredible, tiny creature who had the inexplicable power to turn the whole world upside down.

Please feel free to leave your musings on any of these latest developments below.