And in that question was the whole of the four days that followed, and everything that came after.

I stopped being a drowning woman.

And I started being who I actually was.

The thing that unlocked it, that single question in the dark, deserves to be understood clearly, because it is a question every exhausted woman in an unequal home should ask herself, and almost none of us do.

The question was about the double standard, made suddenly, blindingly visible by Julian’s departure.

Because look at what had just happened, stripped of all the stories we tell to make it seem normal.