For Jonathan and Miriam Draper, life was exactly how it was ordained to be. Jonathan could trace every soldier in his family back to the American Revolution, and Miriam was trained in the ways of the military wife by her mother. Their marriage just a month after graduating high school was less romantic destiny than it was an arrangement of tradition. Jonathan joined up and Miriam set to work cutting their belongings down to an easy to manage few boxes. As a team, they flourished. In each new base, they were complimented on the strength of their relationship and praised highly for how willing they were to join the community and make a name as helpful, happy friends to all on base. For four years, the couple were happy as a pair, free to come and go as they pleased with little more than a comanding officer to tell them what to do. Then, all at once, people started to ask questions. From the commissary to the base hospital, it was young, pregnant wives as far as the eye could see, and yet the Drapers still had not started a family. So, with their sense of duty and tradition firmly in place, they brought a girl into the world and named her Julianne May after their mothers.

All things considered, Jonathan and Miriam were not the sort of people who should have rushed into parenthood. They valued time away from home and with friends so much that, when she was very young, Jules often had trouble sleeping in her own bed as she was so used to sharing a bed with the neighbor's daughter. When Jonathan went away during Desert Storm, Miriam found solace in the other military wives who were happy to commiserate with her while their husbands were gone. When Jonathan returned, sergeant's stripes newly stitched onto his uniform, they were sent off to Europe to conquer and charm a new continent.

The Drapers loved their daughter, but as long as she was safe and healthy, there wasn't much for them to concern themselves with. So Jules blossomed into a smart, funny child without much notice from her family. They signed her glowing report cards, patted her on her head, telling her they were so very proud of her and the Hendersons next door were making spaghetti for dinner so she'd better hurry over before it got cold. In Europe, the world was opened up for her to explore in her parents' absence. Every three years, it was another new city, and Jules took advantage of it with relish. Showing great responsibility from a very young age, she became a latchkey kid before the age of ten, and used that time alone to take a shortcut on the way home or just sit in her little window and talk to the birds outside about the book she was reading. Jules was independent and happy.

And then September 11, 2001. The Drapers, having finished their tour of Europe, were stationed in Texas, living in a house much larger than any they had ever occupied before. Jonathan had just been promoted to Command Sergeant Major and Miriam was considering running for the school board. They were stable for once. And then they were not. When the war began, Jonathan was deployed and it was a deployment that grew like a beast being fed. For the first time, Miriam did not have that support she'd taken solace in a decade before. She just had her daughter. Jules, unaccustomed to so much attention from either of her parents, leaned into the new relationship for three long years. Together, the Draper girls filled their time with school and cheer practice and football games. They shopped and gossiped. Jules became the friend Miriam needed on top of making straight As in school. But what Jules really needed was a mother, and in that, Miriam was disappointing. One night, while Jules was perusing college brochures, Miriam mentioned in passing that her biggest hope was that Ben Perkins would come to his senses and enlist so he could whisk Jules away to live her own life of great adventure.

Needless to say, Jules made sure she got into a college very far away from Texas and her mother and the military. When her father came home from deployment, he retired, settling into a life of training soldiers as a civilian, and Jules was free to set off on her own. It was the greatest joy of Jules's life when she was accepted into UCLA. California was far enough away from her family that she would only have to come home at the holidays, and exciting enough to keep her mother from grousing about her choice. With the freedom to explore her life as she wished, her academic career became her sole focus. She quit athletics and took a job at a restaurant to pay for rent, refusing to ask her parents for any help, lest they decide their money meant they had any say in her career. Ahead of her was a path in neurobiology research where her curiosity could spread out, grasping at the possibilities of the human mind.

In her sophomore year, Jules was working late in the bar, studying for a biochemistry exam between adamant demands for drinks she could not serve. The man doing the ordering was drunk already and angry that Jules could help him become moreso. In his fury, the man broke a chair and threatened her with it, even managing to take a few good whacks to her face before another patron stepped in and took the brunt of the man's furor before the ordeal was over. At the hospital, Jules watched in awe as the nurses did their work, dancing around her and the other people in the emergency room, busy and caring. Their work was practical and helpful. Beautiful. It was exactly what Jules wanted to be. The following semester, she officially changed her major to nursing, her grades making her a welcome addition to the program. They also made her a welcome addition to the University of California at San Fransisco nursing school for her master's degree.

Unlike her own meticulously planned and methodical entrance into the world, Jules's son was a surprise. Once she'd found a life that she loved, it was easy to make room for things like a social life and having fun. After long shifts, she'd go out with the other nurses for a drink or two. Sometimes she'd bring someone home. That night, it seemed, she brought just the right person home. One pregnancy later, Jules' eyes were opened again to the wonder of things that come about by accident. Without a husband or a soldier to clear the brush away for her, she'd found her own adventure.