And the calm had been a lie, a surface, bought with her own silent endurance, the way a placid pond can hide a body.

Real harmony, she understood now, is not the absence of conflict.

It is the presence of fairness.

A home is not peaceful because no one ever objects; it is peaceful because no one has to swallow an objection to keep it looking peaceful.

Her marriage had achieved the first kind and called it the second, for five years, and the cost of the counterfeit had been charged, monthly, to one person.

She had read the statement.