“You need to leave.” I looked at him, and I felt, to my own surprise, no fear at all.

That absence of fear was the strangest part, and I noticed it even in the moment.

For seven years of marriage, some low current of fear had run under everything I did around Roman — not fear of violence, exactly, but the subtler dread of his displeasure, the constant background management of his moods that I had mistaken, for a long time, for love.

I had walked on a particular kind of eggshell for so long that I’d forgotten the ground could be solid.