A marriage in which no one ever fights is not necessarily a marriage at peace.

Sometimes it is a marriage in which one person has simply stopped being allowed to fight, has been trained out of objecting, has learned that raising a grievance costs more than swallowing it.

The silence that others admired in her home had not been harmony.

It had been the specific quiet of her own suppressed voice, and she had mistaken it, for years, for the sound of a happy life, because she had never known any other kind.

She knew, now, what a genuinely peaceful home sounded like, because she was living in one now, and the difference was not that there was less noise.