I learned quickly that intelligence work was not glamorous. It was meticulous, painstaking, and often invisible. The best work I did in those early years was work that no one outside my chain of command would ever know about. And I made peace with that.
I was promoted to lieutenant junior grade in 2014 and completed my first overseas deployment in the Western Pacific. I was 24 and already running more responsibility than my rank officially suggested.
By 2016, I was a lieutenant, and the trajectory was becoming clear to the people above me, even if it was not yet clear to anyone else.
That was the year I met Frank Hansen.
October of 2016. A Fleet Week reception in San Diego, hosted at a naval air facility. I was there as part of an intelligence briefing delegation. He was introduced by a mutual colleague, a lieutenant commander at the time, 31 years old, Navy surface warfare, from a family in Greenwich, Connecticut, that had nothing to do with military life.
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.
But with Frank, it came.