He learned her job. Not formally — he had no reason to, no professional overlap, an entirely different field. But over six years of listening to her talk through cases at dinner, he’d absorbed enough of family law to occasionally, accurately, predict how a judge might rule.
“You’d have made a decent lawyer,” Solange told him once, mildly astonished, after he’d correctly anticipated an opposing counsel’s argument three days before it happened.
“I just listen,” Marcus said. “You explain things well.”
“I explain things at dinner because I’m venting, not teaching.”
“I know. I was paying attention anyway.”
It became, over the years, a kind of game between them — her describing a case in broad strokes, him guessing at angles, occasionally landing somewhere genuinely useful that she’d take, slightly embarrassed, back to the office the next day.
Tonight she was stuck on something, turning a custody case over for the third night running, frustrated with an approach that wasn’t working.
“What if you led with the school records instead of the testimony,” he said, not looking up from his book, the suggestion almost absent-minded.
She stopped. Considered it. “That’s actually—” She looked at him properly. “That’s a good idea.”
“I have my moments.”
“You’ve had six years of moments. You should have gone to law school.”
“I didn’t want to be a lawyer,” he said simply. “I wanted to understand yours.”
That was the whole of it, she realized. Not ambition. Not even particular interest in the field itself. Just the quiet, sustained decision to understand the thing that took up so much of her mind, so that her work would never be a closed door between them.
She used the school records the next morning. They worked.
✦ Today’s Reflection
Has your partner taken the time to understand something central to your work or your world — not because they had to, but because they wanted to know you fully?
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Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 
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