My first real doctor job landed me at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. I was fresh out of residency, wearing the title but not yet the skin. Brett, was still across town at Walter Reed, finishing ophthalmology training and recovering from the soul-crushing eighteen months in orthopedic surgery that had left its scars—on him, on me, on us. Neither of us yet knew what healing looked like when you were the one in need of it.

We lived in a shoebox of a house in Silver Spring, Maryland, with two small children—Onalee and Sayre—and a third waiting to come home from Korea. Onalee had just mastered the bunny-ear method; Sayre was still in Pull-Ups. Korea was the price Brett paid for doing the unthinkable: walking away from the orthopedic boys’ club—the Heisman Trophy of Army residency programs.

He quit on Onalee’s birthday. Drove her to McDonald’s afterward—the kind of father-daughter celebration that doubled as a quiet act of rebellion against the country-club doctor set. That morning, a senior resident had laid into him for showing up at six instead of four—never mind that he’d already told the chief he’d be late. I had a PT test and couldn’t take the kids to daycare, so it was on him. But when the chief made a crack about Brett not having his “wife in order,” something in him finally snapped. The scolding he could take; the public swipe at me, he couldn’t. He didn’t even let the man finish—just walked away and dropped his resignation letter on the program director’s desk.

Not that it came out of nowhere. The realization that the fleeting pride of cocktail-party job title announcements wasn’t worth missing entire childhoods over had been brewing for months. But just as he began to imagine slower mornings and more lunch dates with the kids, the Army handed him unaccompanied overseas orders. And in some unforeseen barter system, that detour gave us KJ.

The adoption took nearly two years—an ordeal I navigated with the subtlety of a caffeinated border collie. It started with a hint of Hallmark. Brett saw an angel tree while stationed overseas, got misty-eyed thinking about Onalee and Sayre, and bought a few gifts. The whole thing was straight out of one of those early-2000s country ballads I used to mock—too earnest, too sentimental. I swore I’d never cry over a paper ornament. And yet, there I was. Something in Brett’s story caught me off guard, brushed up against a tenderness I’d long since quarantined. I became convinced one of those angel tags belonged to our child.

I bulldozed into the world of international adoption like I’d done it a thousand times before. Within two months we had a completed home study, signed paperwork, and a new mission: bring our son home. Unfortunately, the Korean government didn’t share my sense of urgency. I would have to wait. I hate waiting. I didn’t know it then, but sometimes the universe takes its sweet time—to make sure the delivery’s less soiled.

When KJ finally came home, he was fully potty trained—beating his older brother to the punch. By then, I was a few months into my Fort Belvoir stint: three kids under one roof, a husband still in surgical residency—gentleman’s surgery, sure, but still surgery—and a one-plus-hour commute through D.C. traffic each way that made me question every life choice I’d ever made.

Sitting bumper-to-bumper in a city that worships upward motion, I couldn’t help noticing the irony: everyone was striving, no one was moving. Like L.A.—just less photogenic, I used to think. Eventually the brake lights blurred into routine, and the routine into resignation. By the time I reached the gates at Fort Belvoir, I was trading one kind of gridlock for another—bureaucratic, military, and allegedly purposeful.

The Army, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that a fresh-out-of-residency Captain should serve as the Public Health Emergency Officer for the entire Garrison, which meant that if anything remotely shit-adjacent hit the fan, I was in charge of designing the response plan. Meanwhile, I was still submitting help tickets to the “One Stop IT Shop” just to get my emails to respond—a process that, despite the name, required an unknown number of stops and, in the worst cases, a small sacrifice.

Speaking of shit, I was also polishing up an academic paper I’d started during a brief stint at OSHA—on hydrogen sulfide exposure from manure collection. Death by invisible poison. A hired hand had collapsed at work, dead in six minutes. Lungs scorched, brain tinged green. No gas mask. No chance. Proof, I suppose, that a strong enough whiff of bullshit can take a man down. Whether his employer ever accepted responsibility, I never knew. But it landed at OSHA, which usually says enough.

I spent weeks wading through obscure Japanese suicide case studies, trying to reconcile the data that wasn’t there. The absence of a biomarker—the very signal meant to prove exposure—turned out to be the proof itself. Death had come too fast for the chemistry to catch up—a kind of silent violence I’d later recognize by another name.

Technically, my real job was running the Occupational Health program—the office responsible for deciding whether firefighters, police officers, and other testosterone-fueled command types were physically capable of doing theirs. But between the emergencies, the paperwork, and the gas-mask death spiral, it felt more like a side hustle. There was a lot of signing off. And, as it turned out, a lot of pissing off. Some didn’t appreciate being told that high blood pressure, half-finished forms, or a bad attitude toward female physicians might be disqualifying. I wasn’t winning any popularity contests, but I was getting the job done.

Just when I thought the universe had exhausted its sense of humor, a full-blown HR disaster landed in the clinic—a tangled web of “she said, he said,” multiple emails to general counsel, and a dramatic resignation threat complete with a color-coded spreadsheet. Between that and my PHEO title, I was spending more time in meetings—endless circles where nothing got solved but everyone made sure to speak—than in patient care. It was the kind of chaos that could make even the Army’s bureaucratic patience twitch.

I was tired. I was angry. And I was deeply over it.

Then one late-summer afternoon, somewhere between Annandale and McLean, inching forward in what felt like both traffic and life, I glanced left—and saw it.

The most beautiful car I had ever seen.

Or at least, the most beautiful car I’d ever seen while trapped on the Beltway with Daniel the Tiger blaring in the backseat.

A Jaguar F-Type. British racing green. Sleek. Sexy. Growling. Designed for zero practicality and maximum longing.

In the front seat? A man. Smiling. Relaxed. Like traffic was a suggestion, not a condition. He even had the top down—in the middle of the concrete jungle—like he’d never heard of exhaust fumes or sun damage. Carefree. Confident.

I stared. Maybe a little too long. Long enough that he noticed. Long enough to make me wonder when I’d stopped wanting things that didn’t make sense. Because that car didn’t make sense—not with three kids who still needed their grapes cut in half, Army orders looming, and a career already burning me out at both ends. But God, it was beautiful. Reckless. Inefficient. Mine, eventually.

Not that day. But it got under my skin—and as Brett likes to sing, usually when I’m about to do something wildly irrational, “Whatever Lola wants, Stephanie gets.” He’s not wrong.

I hunted the D.C. area for weeks, but no one had the exact one I wanted. It had to be red—angry, passionate, a little dangerous. Green was lovely, sure, but it felt too much like that guy in traffic: calm, unbothered, untouched. I didn’t want calm. I wanted combustion.

Eventually, I found the perfect one. Online. In Monterey. Did I care? Not even a little. When I set my mind on something—whether it’s a beautiful boy from Korea or a car with British heritage and Indian bones—I got it. One way or another. Sometimes creatively.

Conveniently, I’d been scheduled for the Captains Career Course in San Antonio—supposedly leadership training for Army officers, but all I heard was vacation from the never-ending list of duties back home. By then I’d picked up an extra gig in the flight clinic, deciding whether pilots had the stamina to keep stroking their own egos at ten thousand feet. It wasn’t all bad; the job came with the occasional backseat ride and a brief reprieve from the HR melodrama.

Still, after months of testosterone and turbulence, I needed space. The course would do—military-flavored, sure, but still an escape. And I wasn’t about to let a government-funded work trip go to waste. Between PowerPoints and PT, I managed to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and land on top of that River Walk bar—the one weathered with the soles of people still waiting for Jersey Shore to call them back.

By the time graduation rolled around, I figured the Army had gotten its money’s worth. But I wasn’t quite done. I had the Jaguar shipped to San Antonio and started the drive back east. In Arkansas, I picked up Suzanna—always game for divine detours. Years earlier, we’d added two states to a road trip just to visit the Holy Grail of truck stops: movie theater, chiropractor, barber—all under fluorescent light. She still has the T-shirt. We figured this time we’d Bonnie-and-Clyde our middle-aged asses back to reality: top down, music up, scarves secured.

We made a couple of stops in Tennessee. In Nashville, the highlight—if you can call it that—was a hockey game. Not exactly the honky-tonk pilgrimage I had in mind. Broadway didn’t feel the same as it had a decade earlier, when it still clung to a little grit and glory.

Whatever revival Mr. Church had prayed for apparently rang hollow. If Jesus—or Mary—ever did make it to town, they must’ve turned right back around in search of cheaper rent and fewer screaming brides-to-be. And who could blame her? Even Mr. Misunderstood himself would eventually succumb to the bright lights and lucrative bachelorette bar tabs.

After the hockey game and a twenty-dollar biscuit that had the audacity to make me wait for it, I decided we’d paid our respects to the new Nashville. By then, the only thing left to do was drive. Pulling back onto I-40, headlights pointed toward Virginia, I was grateful we hadn’t skipped Memphis—the sermon that came before the commercial break.

When we finally crossed the Maryland state line, the thrill had cooled, the road-trip playlist had faded to static, and reality was already waiting at the end of the off-ramp. 

Suzanna returned home, and I found myself back on the Beltway—just sitting. But at least this time I was sitting in my new mascot: a gleaming, midlife metaphor on wheels, which I now had time to name.

Flo.

Brett assumed it was a menstrual reference, which only proved that after nearly ten years of marriage, he still hadn’t learned my wiring — predictable has never been my genre. Flo wasn’t about cycles; she was named after a band from upstate New York — one I’d chased a few times, but never more memorably than three days after my nineteenth birthday. That night, the balconies shook, the whole room breathed in sync and for a few wild minutes, it felt like the air itself was alive — and I was part of it.

I suppose fifteen years later I was still looking for that feeling anywhere I could find it. The car just seemed like the most logical place to start. Flo held the untamed part of me the world kept trying to sand down. DMV parents shot side-eye at the booster-seated Korean child riding shotgun, unsure whether to call CPS or ask where I’d found the nerve.

When Brett and I finally received those Army orders and moved west to Tacoma, I had it shipped again. I even extended the lease a few extra months, clinging to the illusion that top-down freedom could outlast the reality of my life. 

Eventually, though, it was time to let it go. Onalee cried at the dealership—old enough to recognize what I was really parting with. By the third grade, she already knew the power of a statement piece. Well-trained, that one.

And so, practicality won. The scarves went back in the drawer, the music down to a reasonable volume, and I slid back into the unglamorous embrace of a minivan—reliable, roomy, and depressingly sensible.

But some engines don’t turn off just because you hand over the keys. They idle somewhere deep in the psyche, humming beneath the surface of grocery runs and school drop-offs, waiting for the next spark.