Don’t be nervous, he said on that other December 19, but I wasn’t. Not then. I had no reason to be. You’re a star, he said, and I knew it. I woke up that morning early and eager, a rising star poised to accept all the accolades I was certain to receive in my annual performance review that afternoon. Certain because each of my supervising partners had taken me aside to tell me so. They’d even shown me the glowing evaluations they’d submitted to management. Their reviews were the equivalent of a 4.0—top marks, they said, the best evaluation they’d ever given. They wanted to stroke my ego, to show me how much they appreciated my work. The associates were all competing against one another for these evaluations, but the partners were engaged in their own competition, too—to snag the best of the associates to work on their cases. After all, a lawyer was only as good as his team. The law was a business with little value in the way of hard assets. Human capital was everything, and among the class of third-year associates at Jackson Rieders LLP, I was the capital capital.

I leaned back in the tub and submerged to rinse my hair, then stepped out into the cold and huddled under a towel in front of the oven.

If only the interview weren’t today. Today of all days.

Don’t be nervous, David said, but I wasn’t then. It was he who was. He’d been nervous for six months and verging on panic the last three, ever since Lehman Brothers collapsed into the biggest bankruptcy filing in history. September 15, 2008. A date that will live in infamy. Already Wall Street was calling it the day the world ended. The Dow plunged. The housing market tanked. Unemployment spiked. The credit markets dried up, which meant that the merger and acquisition work that David’s investment bank depended upon was dead. His bonus wouldn’t be as lavish this year. His assured promotion from associate to VP would doubtless be delayed. He’d never worried about money before, but now he did, constantly. We’d overpaid for the apartment, he fretted; our student loan debt was crushing. Our liabilities hung like a black miasma over his head.

But I was sanguine. I was a litigator, after all, and my work wasn’t threatened by the Recession, no matter how Great. When times were bad, the first thing anyone wanted to do was sue somebody. Litigation was as inevitable as death and taxes. My own year-end bonus would surely have enough fat to offset the lean in David’s, and with a little belt-tightening, the bump in my base salary would carry us through until he made VP the following year.

That was what marriage was about, right? Pooling resources. Sharing the burdens. Neither of us could have afforded the apartment on our own, but the bank was happy to make the loan when we applied for it together. And we’d done a brilliant refinancing of our combined student loans: by cosigning for each other, we’d reduced the interest rate by two points, which made a huge difference on a half-million-dollar debt. Joint and several obligation was the legal term. We each owed the whole amount individually, but we also owed it all together, because that was what marriage was all about.