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

He never understood the one thing about me that would have saved him, if he had.

When a woman like me stops arguing, she has not given up.

She has simply stopped wasting her breath, and begun, in the quiet, to take back every single thing that was always hers.

I lifted my glass an inch toward the empty chair across the table, and I smiled, and I took a slow, peaceful sip.

THE END.