“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

She had told herself for years that she would go back.

She hadn’t.

The reasons were reasonable. Child-care logistics. The pace of the practice she had been part of. Gerald’s career requiring certain geographic flexibility.

But underneath the reasons was the truth she had finally said out loud.

She had put down the work she was made for, and she had never continue reading …