My parents sued me for the four point seven million dollars my grandmother left me, and to prove I was unstable their own attorney subpoenaed my service record and put it in front of the judge himself. He had read two pages of a hundred and forty. That is how my family found out what I do for a living.

He did pursue it. It settled in the second year. I do not know the number and I have not asked.

Marigold, my sister, sent me a text about six months after the hearing that said: I didn't know either. About the army. Nobody told me.

I believe her. That does not make it better and she knows it does not, and we speak now, about four times a year, carefully.

Dashiell has never contacted me.

I gave one point one million of it away in the first year, to a fund at Fort Weyland that pays for family emergency travel — the money that gets a private from a base to a hospital three states away when somebody is dying and there are eleven hours to do it in.

That is not a heroic figure. It is under a quarter of it and I mention it only because people ask and because I would rather say the number than let anybody imagine a better one.