My parents exchanged confused glances.
The judge leaned back slightly and narrowed his eyes.
“Wait a moment,” he said carefully.
His gaze never left mine.
“You’re JAG Officer Caroline Ostrander?”
“Lieutenant Commander, Your Honor.
Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
United States Navy.”
“Eleven years.”
Gil Farrow’s pen stopped moving.
My father’s mouth opened.
My mother’s hand went to the pearls.
“Counsel,” the judge said, turning to Farrow, “your petition describes the respondent as unemployed and without fixed residence for eleven years.”
“Your Honor, we — ”
“Her fixed residence has been a naval air station.”
“Her employment has been prosecuting fraud for the United States government.”
He set the page down.
“I’d like to know which of those two facts your clients didn’t know, and which one they knew and left out.”
PART 2
I want to explain the eleven years, because my parents never asked, and a judge just did.
I graduated law school at twenty-three.
I did not tell my parents I had applied, because when I’d said “law school” at Thanksgiving my senior year, my father had laughed and said, “Lindsay’s the one with the head for that,” and Lindsay was, at the time, selling timeshares.
I was commissioned into the Navy JAG Corps four months later.
I told exactly one person.
My grandmother drove nine hours to Newport for the ceremony.
She sat in the front row in her Sunday pearls and cried through the whole thing and afterward said, “Don’t tell your mother.
She’ll find a way to make it about Brett.”
So I didn’t.
For eleven years, I told my family I was “working,” and they filled in the rest with whatever made them comfortable, which turned out to be “drifting.”
I was stationed in Norfolk, then Sigonella, then Yokosuka, then back.
I prosecuted a chief petty officer who’d embezzled from a base childcare fund.
I prosecuted a contractor who’d billed the Navy for a warehouse that was a parking lot.
I defended a nineteen-year-old seaman whose command had decided he was “difficult,” and I won, and I remember thinking, in the hallway afterward, that I had been training for that case since I was nine.
Meanwhile, my grandmother and I wrote letters.
Real ones.
She sent me the church bulletin and gossip about the neighbors.
