“‘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”

like a slow tide. Something neither of us chose exactly, but something we both let happen because the alternatives required more than either of us had at the time.

I signed my final enlistment papers at a recruiting office in downtown Richmond on a Tuesday morning in June of 2010 alone.

My father called that evening and said he hoped it was what I was continue reading …