Every cell in my body wanted to break, to accuse, to demand, to make him feel one flash of the devastation he had handed me in a grocery store that afternoon.

The desire to confront is not weakness; it is one of the most human things there is, the need to make the person who hurt you see that they hurt you, to force the acknowledgment.

And I understood, holding my tongue in his embrace, that this exact need was the trap.

A man like Julian was counting on it.

He was counting on me being too hurt to be strategic, too human to be patient, too much the wronged wife to be the careful investigator.

The moment I confronted him, I would hand him the initiative — he would deny, then delete, then lawyer up, then spin, and every advantage I held in that instant, the enormous advantage of his not knowing that I knew, would evaporate in the satisfaction of one honest outburst.