But he had made the classic error of the person who mistakes kindness for weakness — he had assumed that because I chose not to fight over small things, I was incapable of fighting over large ones.

He had confused a woman who picks her battles with a woman who has no battle in her.

And now, with his hand hanging in the air between us and the word assault still ringing off the walls, he was recalculating two years of marriage-planning in real time and arriving, far too late, at the correct answer: that the accommodating woman had been a choice, not a nature, and that the choosing was over.

The threat about the police was not a bluff, and he could see it wasn’t.

I did still have grease on my face.

There was a witness.