CHAP 1 — That
My father had always believed beauty was a form of family currency.
He polished everything he owned.
Cars. Houses. Watches. Reputation. Children.
Especially children.
Before the explosion, I had been his acceptable daughter. Dark hair. Straight posture. Yale letters he framed in his office even though I chose the Naval Academy instead. A face that looked dignified beside his at charity dinners. A uniform he could brag about without understanding the cost of wearing it.
After the explosion, I became complicated.
Burn scars ran from the left side of my neck over my shoulder, down beneath the line of my collarbone. The surgeons had saved my movement, my life, and most of my face. They had not saved Richard Vale’s preferred photograph of me.
He visited me once during recovery.
He stood at the foot of my hospital bed in a tailored suit, silver cuff links shining under fluorescent light, and said, “We’ll find a specialist before anyone sees you.”
I said, “I already have specialists.”
He looked at the bandages.
“I mean someone who can fix this.”
That was the first time I understood he was not relieved I was alive.
He was offended I had survived visibly.
Two years later, I stood in the foyer of a grand chapel in a wedding gown that did not hide my scars. Sunlight cut through stained glass and painted the floor in red, blue, and gold. Guests waited behind the wooden doors. Daniel Mercer stood beside me in his tuxedo, protective and serious, trying not to stare at my father too obviously.
Richard Vale adjusted his cuff links.
He did that when he was preparing to be cruel.
“You can still change,” he said.
“My gown is already on.”
“It exposes too much.”
“It exposes the truth.”
His mouth tightened.
My sister Camille stood behind him in pale pink silk, arms folded, smiling with the same soft cruelty she had learned from him.
“Dad is only protecting the family image,” she said. “You should have chosen the high-neck gown.”
I looked at her.
“I chose this one.”
Richard glanced toward the chapel doors. “Those photographs will exist for years.”
“Yes.”
“I refuse to be remembered standing beside… that.”
For one second, the ringing came back.
Not from the chapel.
From the blast.
The dull, underwater ringing that had filled my skull when the engine compartment tore open and the air turned orange.
Daniel stepped forward.
I caught his wrist before he reached my father.
“Not here,” I said.
Richard leaned close.
“Without me, you’ll walk alone.”
May you like
I looked at him calmly.
“I have walked through worse without you.”
