And that, I decided, was enough to work with. Not enough to trust. Enough to begin.
Frank’s sister, Margaret, invited us for an ordinary weeknight dinner. Her husband. Their two children. Pasta and salad. A low-key evening.
Helen was not present.
Margaret was careful and sincere, more sincere than I had ever seen her, in fact.
She told me she had watched the video clip from the ball. She said she had not understood what she was seeing until a friend married to a Marine officer had explained the significance of “attention on deck”—what it means when an entire room of commissioned officers rises simultaneously, what rank is required to trigger that response, what it says about the person they are rising for.
Margaret looked at me differently after that. Not with theatrical awe, which would have been harder to receive and impossible to trust. With a simple, recalibrated respect, the kind that arrives when someone realizes they have been looking at a person through a lens that was not their own and decides to put the lens down.
It was the first time I had sat at a table with Frank’s family and not felt the need to manage my own presence.