“‘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”

with no public names and windows that look out onto a parking structure.

I walked as Oracle 7, as a commander in the United States Navy, as a woman who left the University of Virginia in her sophomore year for a reason that took 15 years to become legible to the people around her.

I walked without feeling like I had anything left to prove.

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