Dorian would spend the coming weeks reading Marisol’s stillness as the settling of a storm, as evidence that she was coming around, when in fact it was the opposite: it was the flat calm of a woman who had already left, months of small betrayals having at last completed the long subtraction, and who was now simply handling the paperwork of a departure that had, in every way that mattered, already occurred.

He kept waiting for her to get angry again, because angry he knew how to survive.

He never understood that the quiet was the thing to fear — that she had gone past the country of anger entirely, into the still, cold, final territory beyond it, where there was nothing left to argue about because there was nothing left at all.

Chapter 4 — The Deed on the Screen