Peace.

For two years I had believed that peace was something you achieved by staying quiet — that a good wife kept the peace by swallowing insults, absorbing cruelty, keeping her voice down, not making scenes, not rocking the boat, not disturbing the careful surface.

I had lived in a state of perpetual hyper-vigilance, walking on eggshells, and I had called that peace, because Luca and his family had taught me to call it that, because calling my own silence peace was the only way to make the silence bearable.

And I understood now that it had never been peace at all.