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.

And I have had two years to work out the honest answer, and it is not the noble one.

The noble version is that I did not want to intimidate anybody, or that a courtroom is not a place for theatre, or that I have never once used the uniform for anything personal and was not going to start.

All of that is true and none of it is why.

I did not wear it because for thirty-eight years those two people built a version of me, and I let them, and by about twenty-five I had stopped correcting it out of something I told myself was dignity and which was actually a kind of hoarding.

I was keeping it. All of it — the commission, the eleven years, the nine hundred wills — in a closet, unmentioned, for a day when it would count.

That morning I stood in front of that closet for four minutes and I made a decision that I now understand was not strength.