“Let’s see who respects you now, Harper,” my cousin Derek muttered, slamming my wrist down onto the rough pine of Grandma’s picnic table.

The cold steel of the handcuffs clicked shut before my paper plate even hit the grass.

The potato salad, a blue plastic tub with Grandma’s name taped on the bottom, spilled into the dirt. Nobody in my family moved. My mother stood near the porch steps, her fingers frozen on her collar. Grandma held her serving spoon in midair, her jaw slightly open.

Derek stood over me, smelling of cheap beer and lighter fluid. He was a Macon sheriff’s deputy, and he spent every family gathering wearing his badge like it made him the king of Georgia.

I was just the quiet, divorced cousin who had returned home two years ago with a limp and a quiet voice. They all assumed I had been a low-level clerk who got kicked out of the military because I couldn’t handle the pressure.

I didn’t fight him. I didn’t even raise my voice. I just sat there under the heavy heat of the Georgia pecan trees, looking down at my wrist. I was wearing my father’s old silver-plated watch. The glass was scratched across the face, a mark from my time in Kabul, but the tick was steady. It was the only thing I had left of him.

Derek had always hated that I left Macon. When we were younger, he had tried to join the military too, but he failed the physical. He ended up staying local, joining the sheriff’s academy, and building a career out of minor traffic stops and county-level authority. In his mind, my going away was a personal insult to the family. He convinced himself that I thought I was better than them, and he made it his mission to put me in my place.

I remember the small, bitter comments from the past two years. Every Sunday dinner at Grandma’s house, Derek would find a way to slide a dig into the conversation. He would talk about his latest arrest, bragging about how he handled the real bad guys in the streets. Then he would turn to me and ask if I ever did anything besides type up forms for the officers who actually did the fighting. I always kept my mouth shut. I just let him talk.

My mother, Carol, didn’t make things any easier. She was disappointed that I had come back divorced and quiet. She wanted me to have a normal life, a husband with a steady job in town, and a house with a neat front yard. She didn’t understand the silence that had settled over me. To her, my silence was a sign of failure, proof that I had ruined my life and had nothing to show for eighteen years of service.