That’s for the patient and it’s for the department.”

Which is exactly the right answer and it is the only reason I could do the second one.

The thing about the uniform that I have had to sit with, though, is not any of that.

It is that my commission was the instrument.

Thirty-eight pages of a custody evaluation turned nineteen years of service into a structural defect in a mother. Not within her control and therefore unlikely to be remediable. Three deployments were read into a record in a list on a Tuesday afternoon.

And my daughter, at six, in a room with a stranger and a camera, explained my absence to that stranger in one sentence: she has to go where they say.