“Women don’t get call signs,” my retired Marine stepfather said at my brother’s commissioning dinner, smiling at a room full of officers like he’d just turned me into the joke again, and then I said the two words that made the laughter d.i.e so hard you could hear chairs scrape across the floor

They folded the flag thirteen times, and when they handed the triangle of wool to my mother, her hands were shaking so hard I had to reach out to help her hold it. In that moment, watching the reverence on their faces, I knew I didn’t want a “normal” life; I wanted to be the person who held the line.

My mother moved us inland to a suburb of Manchester a year later, desperate for a life where she couldn’t smell the ocean or hear the foghorns. She wanted peace, but I wanted the only thing that felt like my father: the uniform and the pact.

By the time I was a teenager, my room was a shrine to the Academy, filled with brochures and a framed photo of my dad on the deck of a frigate. My mother started dating a man named Garrett Sterling, a retired Marine colonel who took up too much space in every room he occupied.

I was busy writing my admissions essay about the “Great Pact” while my mother was falling for a man who would spend the next decade trying to make me feel small.