Answer me.

Don’t you dare do something stupid.

I looked at those three messages — the demand, the command, the threat — and I understood that this was the actual voice of my marriage, stripped of the expensive shirts and the reasonable dinner-table tone, and that I had been hearing it for years without letting myself hear it.

And then I did a thing I had never once dared to do in all our years together.

I powered the phone off.

All the way off.