It released.

I typed back a single sentence: Fine.

I’ll handle it my way. And he replied with a thumbs-up emoji — a little cartoon thumbs-up, the kind you send to confirm a lunch order — and that small, obscene, careless gesture was the exact moment I stopped, forever and without any grief at all, being his wife.

He thought he had won an argument.

He had, in fact, just approved his own destruction, with a thumbs-up, from a fishing boat.