AT 60, I FOUND OUT I HAD A DAUGHTER THROUGH A DNA TEST

While Tom had been raised by loving parents, I had been shuffled from one foster home to another until I aged out of the system. But my brilliant mind and tenacity had gotten me to college, and then law school.

There is always something inside us that calls us to where we are meant to be.

Now when I got home, there was no more Tom to share a glass of wine with over takeout pasta, no one to argue heatedly over the issues we were defending, no one to reach for in that cold empty bed.

The terrible feeling of being sundered, less than a whole person that I’d felt all my life had vanished when I met Tom—but now that terrible loneliness was consuming my life.

I increased my office hours, poured myself into more cases until one day I simply collapsed in the middle of an impassioned closing, arguing in defense of a young homeless mother who had killed the social worker who had tried to take her baby. The woman of steel was no more.

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