He was charming without effort. He had an ease about him that suggested he had never needed to fight particularly hard for anything, but he wore that ease gently, without arrogance.
And within the first 10 minutes of conversation, he asked me about my work before he asked me anything personal. I noticed this. It mattered.
Most people led with the personal. Frank led with the professional. And in doing so, he told me something about what he valued without saying it out loud.
The year that followed was phone calls across time zones, his deployment schedule against my classified posting schedule, creating gaps and compressions that would have broken something less sturdy.
Frank was attentive in a specific way. He asked about my work without pressing on the parts I could not share. And he treated the classified boundary as fact rather than obstacle.
I had spent my adult life surrounded by people who found my career either impressive in a performative way or vaguely inconvenient. Frank was neither.
He was simply interested.
I let myself trust him. It did not come easily. Trust has never come easily to me, not since my mother left. And I learned that presence was not the same as permanence.