The room erupted in laughter when the confetti cannon hit my face.

I clamped one hand over my left eye as silver paper strips slid down my cheek. The blast had come from less than two feet away, fired by my sister’s new husband, Derek, during the reception at a hotel outside Columbus, Ohio.

“Open your eye and stop embarrassing me,” my sister, Vanessa, snapped, trying to pull my hand away.

“I can’t see,” I whispered.

She rolled her eyes. “You always have to make everything about you.”

The music kept playing. Guests raised their phones. Someone shouted that the video would be hilarious. Derek handed the cannon to a groomsman and laughed as if he had pulled a harmless prank.

My eye burned like hot sand had been pressed beneath the lid. I stumbled toward the lobby bathroom, but Vanessa caught my arm.

“Do not ruin my pictures,” she said through a fixed smile. “Wash your face and come back.”

I did not return. An emergency-room doctor removed two sharp fragments of metallic confetti from beneath my eyelid and found a small corneal abrasion. He told me I was lucky.

Three days later, I received a call from a man named Aaron Bell, one of Derek’s college friends. His voice was tight.

“I was reviewing my wedding footage,” he said. “There’s something you need to know.”

Aaron had been filming behind the head table with a professional camera. His video showed Derek in a service hallway twenty minutes before the blast. Derek opened the confetti cannon, poured something from a small plastic bag into the barrel, then twisted the launcher shut.

The footage also captured Vanessa standing beside him.

“What did he put in it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “But I found the cannon in my equipment case. Derek must have dropped it there after it went off.”

Aaron took the cannon and the memory card to police.

That afternoon, Detective Marissa Cole came to my apartment. She placed a clear evidence photograph on my kitchen table. Inside the cannon were tiny metal shavings, larger and heavier than the decorative foil used at the reception.

“We believe this was modified,” she said. “The question is whether they meant to frighten you, injure you, or do something worse.”

My stomach turned. For years, Vanessa had called me dramatic whenever I challenged her. Now a detective was treating her wedding joke as planned violence.