It is a strange kind of power, the power of silence, and I had spent twenty years on the wrong end of it before I learned to wield it.

All those years, my silence had been submission — the quiet of a woman swallowing what she was not permitted to say.

But silence, I was learning, is not one thing.

There is the silence of surrender, and there is the silence of the person who has already won and is simply waiting for her opponent to realize it, and from the outside they can look identical, which is exactly what makes the second one so devastating.

Julian had spent our whole marriage reading my silence as the first kind.

He would have no way of knowing, walking into that dining room, that it had become the second.