They thought Niko was beneath the family, a nice enough man without prospects, and Niko had done things for his country that would have stopped their breath, and had done them without ever once needing them to know.

That was the discipline of it.

That was the cost.

You let the people you love think less of you, year after year, and you tell yourself it doesn’t matter, that their approval was never the point — and mostly that’s true, and once in a while, on a cold morning, it isn’t.

They saw the surface I had spent twelve years building for exactly this purpose — to be looked at and dismissed — and they had no idea that the dismissing was the whole point, that being underestimated by my own family was not a wound I’d suffered but a cover I’d maintained, deliberately, at real cost, for a very long time.

I had let my father believe I pushed paper for the Department of Defense.