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.

I did not do it out of principle. I did it because I have signed off on nineteen of those travel requests personally and I have twice had to tell a twenty-two-year-old that the fund was empty that month.

The rest is where the rest is. I still live in the same apartment. I still drive the same car, which my sister finds insulting.

The rest is where the rest is and I am fine and it has changed almost nothing about how I live, which surprised me more than anything else in this entire account.

Now the suit.

The last thing my mother said to me, in the corridor after the hearing while people were still coming out of the courtroom, was not about the money.

She said: why didn't you wear the uniform?

That is the only question either of my parents has ever asked me about my career and she asked it as an accusation, on a Tuesday morning, at sixty-six years old.