And then he took hold of her arm.

Hard — his fingers closing around her wrist and squeezing, a grip with real force in it.

“Don’t ever talk about my family like that again.”

She looked down at his hand on her wrist, and at the red marks his fingers were leaving on her skin, and then she looked up at his face.

She said nothing.

But something that had been holding for five years came quietly and completely apart, and when he let go she rubbed her wrist once and turned back to the sink, and she had already decided everything, though he didn’t know it yet.