People assume, when they hear this story, that it was the dinner that ended my marriage — the empty plates, the cruelty of it, the half a cucumber.

It wasn’t.

The dinner was ugly, but the dinner alone I might have survived; I had survived uglier.

It was the kitchen.

It was his hand closing around my wrist.

Because in five years of marriage, through every insult and every you know how they are, Ansel had never once put his hands on me, and I had told myself that this — his passivity, his conflict-avoidance, his endless smoothing-over — was at least the shape of a gentle man, a weak one maybe, but not a cruel one.