There are exactly three people in my family who matter to this story, and together, they form a perfect, isosceles triangle of assumptions about my existence.
At the apex sits my father, Richard DeWitt, a sixty-eight-year-old retired insurance executive who measures a person’s worth by the exclusivity of their country club membership and the troy weight of the gold watch on their wrist. At the second point is my brother, Gregory, forty-one, a hedge fund manager who made his first million by thirty and his first felony-adjacent enemy by thirty-one. And finally, my sister Nicole, thirty-seven, a corporate attorney married to a man whose last name opens restaurant doors I could requisition with a phone call, but never do.
Each point of this triangle reinforces the others, creating a geometry of condescension so structurally sound it is almost architectural.
I am Shaina DeWitt. To them, I am the middle child who “works in paperwork.” To the fifty-two thousand souls currently residing on my property, I am Colonel DeWitt, Installation Commander of Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases on the face of the planet.
