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California, heat, away from all the pressures of her professional life, should show her how to slow down, learn to relax and enjoy doing nothing. It was time to develop a strong sense of autonomy and remind herself that hers was the life she chose . And she was in a big hurry to get all that nailed down. Besides, it was cheaper than going to Tibet.
    There were very logical reasons Erin was wound a little tight; the habit of overachieving could take its toll. When Erin was eleven, her mother died. That left her the woman of the house, with a grieving father, a four-year-old sister, Marcie, and a two-year-old brother, Drew. She wasn’t solely responsible for them; her dad was still the parent, albeit a little less conscious right after his wife’s death. And there had to be a babysitter during the day while Erin went to school.
    But Erin rushed home from school to take over and had a ton of chores in addition to child care. She felt it was up to her to be the mother figure in their lives whether they liked it or not. As a matter of fact, as her siblings got older, she concentrated harder on their needs and activities than her own, from soccer to piano lessons to making sure they got good grades and didn’t live on junk food. She rarely went out, never seemed to have a boyfriend, skipped all the high-school events from football and basketball to the dances. She did, however, always make the honor roll. She had decided at an early age that if she couldn’t be f-u-n , she would be s-m-a-r-t .
    She was twenty-two, a new law-school freshman, and still living at home so she could keep an eye on the kids who were then thirteen and fifteen, when their father died during a routine knee-replacement surgery. Erin was again in charge. Not that much had changed, besides missing her dad dreadfully. But technically, she was even more in charge than before, because being over twenty-one, she actually had custody.
    Friends and colleagues were in awe of all she’d been able to accomplish. After her younger sibs had survived their teen years, she’d helped her sister, who was married to a marine who had been wounded in Iraq and had lingered in a vegetative state for years in a nursing home before he died. She’d gotten her younger brother through college and medical school. And during this time she’d built herself a sterling reputation as an attorney in a very successful firm. The local paper wrote some sappy article on how she was one of the most amazing and desirable single women in the city—the head of a household that depended on her, brilliant in tax and estate law, gorgeous, clearly the woman to catch.
    It had made her laugh. She could count on one hand the number of dates she’d had in a year—all of them horribly dull.
    Erin had accomplished what she’d set out to do. Her little sister was remarried to her late husband’s best friend, had moved into her own home in Chico and was pregnant with her first child. Her younger brother had completed medical school with honors and was an orthopedic resident in Southern California, a tough five-year residency that rarely let him loose. Drew was twenty-seven and lived with his fiancée; he would be a family man in another year.
    Erin had fulfilled a great deal by the age of thirty-six; for herself and her brother and sister, this was exactly what she had worked so hard toward. Why, then, did she still feel like something was missing in her life?
    Was this how it was supposed to feel when your life was really just beginning? Uncertain and as wobbly as a newborn fawn? Or was this, as she sometimes feared, the end of the road? Nothing much to strive for now? She felt more like a grandmother to Marcie’s expected baby than an auntie. She was a bit panicked and didn’t know where to turn. But of course, Erin had the best poker face in the profession of law and never let it show.
    Marcie’s new husband, Ian Buchanan, had left behind a dump of a cabin that he held on to when he’d moved