My father saw the marks across my neck and shoulder, stepped back, and whispered, “I won’t walk a damaged woman down the aisle.”

My father saw the marks across my neck and shoulder, stepped back, and whispered, “I won’t walk a damaged woman down the aisle.”

Three minutes before the wedding music was supposed to begin, Richard Vale rejected me in front of the chapel doors. For a moment, the world blurred away, and all I could hear was the dull ringing that had followed me since the explosion in the Arabian Sea.