My shoulders dropped an inch and stayed there.

I slept differently.

I found myself, sometimes, standing in a room doing nothing, simply noticing that I was not braced for anything, that no one was about to come home and require careful handling, that the air held no threat.

It was disorienting, at first, how much lighter everything was, how much energy I suddenly had that had been going, all along, into the invisible labor of enduring.

And it made me understand something about the cost of the life I had been living that I had never been able to see from inside it: that I had been paying, every single day, an enormous tax in vigilance and self-suppression, and calling it marriage.