I have thought, more than anything else, about the silence.

For eight years, Adrian read my silence as emptiness.

When I did not fight, he heard defeat.

When I did not weep, he heard a cold and barren woman with nothing inside her — a spreadsheet, my sister said, where a heart should be.

When I signed the papers without a word, he heard surrender, and he was so certain of what my silence meant that he built his entire scheme on it.

He believed, to his core, that a quiet woman is an empty one, and that a woman who does not scream has already lost.