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

“It makes the truth difficult for you to hit.”

I have thought a great deal about that sentence since, because it was the truest thing I said all evening, and because it holds the whole difference between the person Roman was and the person I had become.

Roman’s power had always been the power of the raised hand and the raised voice — the power to make a room, or a wife, go quiet through fear.

It is a real power; I do not want to pretend it isn’t.