She went alone on a Sunday morning.
Not because anything was wrong — everything was, by any measure she could apply, genuinely right. Not because she had doubts, exactly. But because she had learned, in twenty-two years of managing her own life, that the most important decisions deserved the specific examination that could only happen in solitude.
She walked to the lake. The June morning was everything Chicago could offer at its best — the light on the water, the specific blue of the sky, the city’s skyline visible behind her, all of it arranged with the unconscious grandeur of a place that had been doing this for a hundred and fifty years and had gotten very good at it.
She sat on a bench and looked at the water and asked herself the question honestly.
Are you choosing this from stren
