“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

He would come home smelling like diesel and salt, spinning me around while laughing. “Still here, Kin. Still drawing the lines,” he would whisper.

In 2006, when I was twelve, a Navy chaplain walked up our driveway on a gray Tuesday morning. I was tying my shoes for school when my mother opened the door and made a sound that haunted my dreams for years.

A high-pressure steam line had burst in the engine room of the USS Kearsarge, and my father was one of the four who didn’t make it out. People told us he died doing what he loved, but at twelve, I just hated that he loved something that could take him away forever.

I remember the hospital in Portsmouth being a blur of white lights and the smell of floor wax. My mother was a ghost in a plastic chair, and I sat next to her holding a brochure about military honors that I read until I knew every fold of the flag by heart.

The funeral was held at a cemetery overlooking the Piscataqua River under a sky that looked like bruised lead. I stood there in a black dress that felt itchy and stiff, watching the sailors in their whites move with a precision that felt like a dance.

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.

My mother married Garrett in the summer of 2016, which was the same season I graduated from the Academy and became an Ensign. I tossed my cover into the air in Annapolis on a Saturday, and two months later, I was watching her marry a man who viewed the Navy as a taxi service for the Marines.