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others was a projection of my own self-hatred; how I needed to develop my own sense of worth and validation from within. I could conjure up these ideas in my mind but had no access—as if they were inside a clear but impenetrable balloon. I’d rarely been bulimic, but I now welcomed the violence of the act, the opportunity to taste and expel the self-loathing and the rage I was feeling.
    When Bill picked me up from the airport, he found me broken. My eyes were underscored with dark purple semicircles, and I still felt drugged from the binge. “This is why we stay in a hotel,” he said, leading me to a taxi, where I curled into a ball in the back seat.
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    â€œWhere are your parents going to stay?” Bill asked the week before my parents’ scheduled trip. The visit would be their first to Chicago since we’d moved back from London, almost five years since my grandfather had passed. In the past three years, our relationship had improved. Over phone calls, we had started a gentle process of reconnection. I remembered often the guidance of my therapist in London, who reminded me, “The goal is not to change them. It’s to change you.”
    During the two years I’d seen her, I’d made strides. I was eating normally, writing every day, and in training for my licensure in holistic medicine. Before Bill and I moved back to the States, I went to see her for a follow-up session and to say goodbye. She offered me a challenge.
    â€œYou are clear about having wanted unconditional love and acceptance from your family growing up, but have you offered the same in return?”
    I thought about the ways in which I had focused on what I hadn’t received, the hurts I’d experienced, my longing for certain childhood needs to be met.

    â€œLet that be your practice now.”
    I told her that I would try.
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    The reason for my parents’ upcoming trip to Chicago was a restorative-justice conference that my father wanted to attend. He had just retired from a thirty-five-year career at a government agency and was treating his first year of retirement as a sabbatical, using it to explore his next steps. My mother, who planned to continue at her job writing contracts for a technologies firm for another year or two before retiring, had decided to come along for the weekend.
    â€œOnly your father would devote an entire year to personal discovery and spiritual retreat. Other people retire and play golf,” my mother told me over the phone before their visit. I imagined her in the kitchen of our family’s house, putting away baking pans from a batch of lemon squares she’d baked for their book club that night. She relayed the information about my father’s sabbatical with a mock tone of exasperation, but I thought I detected admiration in her voice as well. I wondered if she was in some way living the year vicariously through him, looking to see what wisdom my father might glean and for clues to how she might structure her own sabbatical year, should she ever choose to be so audacious.
    The plan for the weekend was for my parents to stay at the hotel downtown where the conference was being held. My mother and I and my aunt who lived in Milwaukee would have a touristy day in Chicago exploring Millennium Park and the Art Institute, followed by lunch at one of the nicer restaurants off Michigan Avenue. Bill and I would see my parents again on Sunday afternoon, after the conference ended, for tea or a late lunch at our house before they flew home to Virginia.
    My MRI at Saint Joseph was scheduled for seven o’clock the Saturday morning of my parents’ visit, but the week before they were
due to arrive, the hospital called and offered me the same time a week earlier. I took it, grateful I would have the test out of the way before they came.
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    On the morning of the MRI, I gave myself plenty of time to drive to the hospital. At six fifteen, the sun had already risen