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

So I stayed calm.

Not because I was beaten, but because calm was the water I needed to move in.

Every dinner I let pass without a fight, every insult I absorbed without a scene, was not a defeat.

It was a day I stayed close enough to gather what I needed, without alarming the thing I was gathering it on.

He thought my composure was the sound of a woman giving up.

It was the sound of a woman taking aim.