Dorothy took a DNA genetic assay as a joke, looking for distant relatives, only to be told she had a daughter, even though she had never been pregnant.

Dorothy Weaver had never considered herself a lonely woman until she lost her husband at 57. Dorothy and her husband Thomas had both been human rights attorneys and their passion for their cause had been all-absorbing.

They met in college at a student protest and had fallen in love at first sight. Over the next thirty-five years, they had occasionally thought about having children, but then another cause would appear, and the baby project would be set aside another year.

The decades followed each other faster than Dorothy had thought possible, and one day having a baby was no longer possible — but they could still adopt. Tom and Dorothy had started the adoption process when he died.

Dorothy had been in the office, going over a last-ditch maneuver to save a teen on death row when the phone rang. She picked it up, irritated at the interruption. “This had better be good!” she’d snapped.

“Mrs. Weaver?” the quiet voice on the line raised the hairs on the back of her neck. “It’s about your husband, Mr. Thomas Weaver…”

Dorothy let the phone slip from her nerveless fingers, drowning out the sympathetic voice and all the futile explanations. Tom was gone. That big, brave heart had failed. “I’m alone,” Dorothy whispered, “I’m all alone.”

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

There is always something inside us that calls us to where we are meant to be.
Now when she 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 they were defending, no one to reach for in that cold empty bed.

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

Dorothy increased her office hours, poured herself into more cases until one day she 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. Dorothy, the woman of steel was no more.

After a long convalescence, she finally took stock of her life. She was now just 60, too young to retire but also not strong enough to practice law like she used to.