We can talk about all of this when I get home!”

“No.”

It was one word, and it was the first time in fourteen years that I had said it to him without an apology attached, without an explanation trailing behind it, without softening it or taking it back.

Just no, clean, with nothing after it.

And then I hung up the phone, and I looked across the kitchen at my two children eating dinner at the table, and I felt, for the first time in longer than I could remember, wholly like myself.

Chapter 10 — The Dingy Motel