“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

wasn’t nothing to me, from a man I had barely met.

I called Priya from the parking lot of the Pentagon annex that April morning after I had looked at the photo of Ethan long enough to commit it to memory.

She picked up after two rings.

“Ethan made major,” I said.

“Good for him,” she said. “How do you know?”

“He put Oracle 7 in his promotion speech.”

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