Chicago in spring was a revelation.
Aria had grown up in the city and knew its seasons the way you know the moods of someone you’ve lived alongside for a long time — not just intellectually but in the body, the specific way the air changed and the light changed and the particular quality of the city’s energy shifted when winter finally released its grip.
But she had never experienced a Chicago spring the way she experienced this one.
It wasn’t the city that was different. It was her.
She walked to DePaul on Tuesday and Thursday mornings — the evening program had turned out to have two morning seminars that she’d added to her schedule because the professor was extraordinary and the subject matter, financial law and ethics, was exactly the thing she hadn’t known she needed until she sat
