For Nine Years He Mistook My Silence for Surrender; What He Never Understood Was That Every Dinner I Didn’t Fight About Was a Day I Stayed Close Enough to Gather What I Needed to End Him

I could have had Lorna serve him at his office, coldly, through a process server.

I chose to have it happen here, at this table, in this staged scene of my supposed defeat, because I wanted the shape of the evening to tell the truth of it: that everything he had arranged to make me small was, in fact, the architecture of his own undoing, and that he had spent the whole day helping me set the table for it.

He thought he was the host of that dinner.

He was its main course.