At the bottom, the ink was still stark and black: Authorized by Colonel Shaina DeWitt, Installation Commander.

My father would open this at his Father’s Day brunch. He would be surrounded by family and the specific breed of social climbers who viewed the military as a career path for those who failed to get into the Ivy League. He would glance at it, dismiss it as something practical—and therefore inferior—and then someone, it didn’t matter who, would recognize the seal.

The trap was primed. The ordinance was live. I just had to wait for Father’s Day.

I learned the art of invisibility by the time I was twelve. It wasn’t cruelty, exactly; it was the benign neglect that befalls the child who doesn’t fit the pattern. Gregory was the golden boy, a prodigy of compound interest. Nicole was the baby, charming and litigious from birth. I was just Shaina. Steady. Reliable. Good at following instructions.

“Shaina will be fine,” my mother used to say, waving a hand dismissively when friends asked about my future. “She’s very… organized.”

She died when I was nineteen. A quick, brutal cancer that dismantled her in six months. My father remarried within two years to a woman named Patricia, who was pleasant enough but utterly uninterested in stepchildren who were already voting age. The family gatherings continued, minus the one person who might have bothered to look closely at me.

I joined ROTC in my sophomore year of college. My father signed the paperwork with a distracted flourish, already late for a tee time.