My husband pushed me down the stairs, and as I lay shattered at the bottom, my mother-in-law called my father and said, “Come get your worthless daughter and take her back.” Dad gave her only one warning: “If she has so much as a scratch, your family will answer for it.” They laughed at him because they had absolutely no idea who my father truly was.

We walked past the hallway where, a year earlier, he had stood looking like a man who had misplaced the ground beneath him.

“Do you miss the old job?” I asked as we crossed the parking lot.

“Sometimes,” he said.

“Mostly I miss being able to believe the right evidence would always lead to the right result.”

“Did you ever believe that?”

“I believed it often enough to keep working.”

We laughed softly.

On the drive home, he told me about a case from early in his career that he had never mentioned before.