“Enjoy it,” I said softly, and I hung up.

They believed, both of them, that my calm meant weakness.

They always had.

My whole life, my mother and my sister had read my quietness as softness, my patience as permission, my unwillingness to fight over small things as an inability to fight at all.

It was the central miscalculation of their lives, and they were about to pay for it in years.

Chapter 10 — What I Actually Do