I had been wrong about nearly all of it.

The stillness had never been emptiness.

It had been a held breath.

And the peace I had been buying with my silence had not been peace at all; it had been only the absence of the next eruption, which is a very different and much poorer thing.

I had confused the two for most of my adult life — the absence of conflict with the presence of peace — and they are not the same, and the gap between them is where a great many women quietly spend their years.

The absence of conflict can be bought with endless small surrenders, and I had bought it that way, nightly, for a long time.