He could not have been more wrong, and his wrongness about it was the thing that undid him.

Because my silence was never emptiness.

It was never surrender.

It was, the whole time, the room where the work was done.

There are two kinds of quiet a woman can go, and from the outside they look identical, which is why men like Adrian cannot tell them apart.

There is the quiet of a woman who has been broken, who has given up, who has nothing left to say.