25/08/2026
"It's going good."
You've said it so many times it comes out before you've thought about it.
Somebody asks how the firm's doing. Good. A client asks if you're busy. Good. Your brother asks at Christmas. Good.
And then there's the one at your own kitchen table, at the end of a day where two things went wrong and nothing got signed. She asks how it went.
Good.
You're not lying, exactly. You're managing. There's a version of the truth that would take forty minutes. It would end with her worrying about something she can't do anything about. So every day, for years, you've decided she'd rather have the short answer.
So you give her the short answer. She takes it. You both move on to what's for dinner.
Here's the thing about the short answer.
You've been giving it since before the kids could drive. It has covered good quarters and bad ones, months where the card got paid off and months where it didn't. It's the same word every time, which means after a while it stops carrying any information at all.
And you know that. That's the part that sits with you on the drive home. Not that the month was bad — but that you're about to say good again, and that good hasn't meant anything in your house for a long time.
That is not a marriage problem. It's what happens when you carry the whole thing on your own for two decades. You decided, correctly, that there's no point handing her a worry she can't solve.
You didn't go to law school to be the only one holding it.
An attorney in Minnesota was giving the short answer too. Eighteen years in when he came to us. Paper files, answering his own phone, no paralegal.
I asked him afterwards what the best part had been. I expected the money, or the time.
He said this: "Watching my wife have a level of hope that she hasn't seen in quite a long time."
Not the revenue. Not the hours. Her hope.
And this, on what walking in the door sounds like now: "I come home and I'm like, hey hon, guess what? Three more contracts today."
One firm, one experience — and he'd tell you the first month was the hardest part of it.
What would you want to be able to say at dinner instead?
