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Sitting amongst them, I feel decidedly unfeminine.

It’s ironic. I should be in my moment of triumph. The men I’ve looked up to for the last decade are now my peers. I envisioned this moment through every long hour I’ve worked into the night, through all the friends I’ve sacrificed. It’s sustained me as I abandoned my social life… Then my activism…

…and now, even my relationship.

For this.

Now that I triumphed, success is empty. The betrayal sits heavy in my soul.

“Please excuse me,” I say, interrupting my first partners’ meeting almost as soon as I’ve sat down to it.

I recluse myself. Earlier this morning, I’dneverhave imagined slinking out of a partners’ meeting – let alone myfirst.

But I do. I leave quickly, my heels clicking against the floor as I walk, in a daze, towards the elevator.

Marissa gives me a confused look as the doors shut with a ‘ding’.

I exit the building into the bustle of New York, finding delicious anonymity in the busy sidewalks. Here, I’m just another career girl - making her way in the Big City.

No one who sees me can guess that I’m a failure – as a girlfriend, a lawyer, and worst of all…

…as awoman.

Partner by 32.

Married by 33.

Two beautiful kids by 36.

Those were the goalposts I’d built my life upon.

The rest was fluff – where I lived, where I shopped, how I dressed. I’d always imagined I’d figurethatout once I got there.

A dog, maybe… I’d thought that far ahead – although I’d never liked the idea of cooping one up in a New York City apartment.

I shake my head and look around.

Immediately – trained by my criminal justice degree, law school background, and passing the bar - my mind starts focusing instead on the seemingly inane details of my surroundings:

I focus on a woman’s hat. The crook of a man’s nose. My attention is taken by a floating grocery bag, discarded and used. In a courtroom, these are all clues…

But out here? They’re distractions.

But they cover up the pressure boiling up in me.

Once again, I’m brought back to my first case – when the panic attack had almost cost me everything. I feel like I’m about to explode just like that again – my conscious mind rebelling at the shock of my new reality.

Then, suddenly, a crackling sound makes me turn my head.

One of New York’s many dark alleyways stretches off to my right. People walk past me – grunting irritably as they have to walkaroundme – and I just feel like a stone in a river; changing the teeming flow in my own minute, meaningless way.

Yet I stand there, and look.

I’ve walked past the alley a thousand times and never spared it a glance.

Danger.

The thought bubbles up in me. And yet… Somehow, the dark alleycallsto me. Other people walk by, as if they can’t hear the same subtle, tingling,cracklingsound that I can – like twigs crunching underfoot in the midst of a forest.