Chapter 1 — Go Home

“Go home,” Lucan whispered, after his hand struck my shoulder hard enough to make me stumble into a champagne table.

“She belongs beside me tonight.”

The blow landed under my collarbone and burned there, a hot bright point beneath my blue silk dress.

I caught the edge of the table, steadied the glasses I’d knocked, and did not fall.

It was not the first cruelty of our marriage, but it was the first that left a mark on my body, and that made it different.

Contempt you can absorb for years — I had.

Coldness, dismissal, the slow erasure of being treated as ornamental: all of that lives in the air between two people, deniable, easy to talk yourself out of. He’s under stress.

He didn’t mean it that way.

I’m being sensitive. But a hand that strikes you hard enough to make you stumble is not deniable.

It is physical, and specific, and it happens in a fraction of a second that cannot be reinterpreted afterward into something gentler.

In that hot bright point under my collarbone, three years of deniable cruelties suddenly became undeniable.

I had spent those years granting my husband the benefit of every doubt, and in one shove he spent the last of it.

I understood, steadying those champagne glasses, that whatever I had told myself about the state of my marriage, the truth was now written on my own skin, and it could not be un-written.