My orders were simple: secure the classified equipment, verify my health, and move me to guarded housing near the base.

I will not say more about it than that, because there is nothing more that belongs in a story like this, and because the details were never the point.

The point was only this: the humiliation my family felt, standing in the cold watching a colonel salute the daughter they had banished to a garage, was not something I engineered.

It was an accident of timing — the collision of a high-level security protocol with an ordinary morning of family cruelty.