At the Valet Stand
Part One: Operational Camouflage
In military intelligence, we call it operational camouflage. It’s the art of appearing exactly as expected while hiding what matters until the moment leverage is highest. I’ve been running that operation on my own family since I was old enough to notice how their eyes slid past me when the conversation turned to “success.”
They never asked what I did.
They just decided. In their world, success had a uniform: big job title plastered on LinkedIn, big house in the right neighborhood, big car that made neighbors look twice, big story told at holiday tables with the same tone people use to describe championship victories or stock market windfalls. My older brother, Garrett Fiero, fifty years old and looking every day of it despite the expensive haircuts, was regional VP at a Silicon Valley tech firm.
He wore that title like it was tattooed on his forehead. He measured his worth in stock options and office square footage and the quality of restaurants where he took clients. His wife Suzanne collected designer handbags the way I collected security clearances: carefully, competitively, and with an unspoken belief that the collection itself proved something fundamental about worth.
Then there was me. Dina. The family cautionary tale wrapped in uncomfortable silences and pitying glances.
The unmarried sister who “never quite figured it out.” The one who rented instead of owned. The one who drove a twelve-year-old Subaru with a dent in the rear bumper from a parking lot incident I’d never bothered to fix. The one with the vague government job nobody understood and nobody bothered to ask about because, in their minds, the answer would probably be embarrassing—something low-level and bureaucratic, pushing papers in some forgotten office building.
Their assessment wasn’t entirely inaccurate on the surface. I did rent a modest two-bedroom apartment in San Diego that cost less per month than Garrett spent on his Tesla payments. The furniture was functional rather than fashionable.
The art on my walls came from Target, not galleries. I did drive that beat-up Subaru Outback with over a hundred and twenty thousand miles on it because it ran fine and I genuinely didn’t care about impressing strangers at stoplights or valet stands. And yes, I did work for the government.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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