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

Chapter 3 — The Table for Three

I set the table for three.

At seven o’clock, Roman opened a bottle of Burgundy — a good one, one he had bought years earlier and promised, at the time, to save for our tenth anniversary.

We were nine years married.

He did not seem to remember the promise, or did not care to, as he poured it to breathe for a woman who was not me.

At a quarter past seven he checked his phone and frowned.