“Nobody is going to hide you from your own family.” And I want to record that in that moment, kneeling on a laundry-room floor three minutes before my own wedding, I already knew, with a soldier’s cold clarity, that there would be no wedding — and that the only question left was how, not whether.

People have asked me since whether the decision was hard — whether, standing three minutes from a wedding I had planned for months, in front of a hundred guests, with the deposits paid and my commanding officer in the third row, I agonized over it.

The honest answer is that it was the easiest decision I have ever made, and the ease of it surprised me as much as anything that day.

There was no agonizing, because there was nothing to weigh.