One of the first things I learned is that there is little research on lawyers and drug abuse. But as a picture of his struggle took shape before my eyes, so did another one: The further I probed, the more apparent it became that drug abuse among America’s lawyers is on the rise and deeply hidden. Human beings are physically and emotionally complex, so there is no simple answer as to why Peter began abusing drugs. The nights he told our children he was running out to get a soda, only to disappear. I needed to see the signs I hadn’t known were signs. I studied his texts to drug dealers, and I compared the timing of those with dates and times of A.T.M. (To protect the privacy of our children and Peter’s extended family, I’m not using his surname.) In my attempt to fathom what happened to him and how I - and everyone else in his world - missed it, I set out to create a map of Peter’s life the year before he died. Not only was Peter one of the smartest people in my life, he had also been a chemist before becoming a lawyer and most likely understood how the drugs he was taking would affect his neurochemistry. I parked in Peter’s driveway, used my key to open the front door and walked up to the living room, a loftlike space with bamboo floors bathed in sunlight. Although we were divorced, we had known each other by then for nearly 30 years. So I drove the 20 minutes or so to his house, to look in on him. Then, for two days, Peter couldn’t be reached. He had been working more than 60 hours a week for 20 years, ever since he started law school and worked his way into a partnership in the intellectual property practice of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a prominent law firm based in Silicon Valley. I thought maybe the stress of his job as a lawyer had finally gotten to him, or that he was bipolar. His voice mail messages and texts had become meandering soliloquies that didn’t make sense, veering from his work travails, to car repairs, to his pet mouse, Snowball. He could be angry and threatening one minute, remorseful and generous the next. His behavior over the preceding 18 months had been erratic and odd. In July 2015, something was very wrong with my ex-husband, Peter.