And that was when she hit me.

I am not going to dwell on it.

She struck me across the face — once, hard, the flat crack of it and then the sting and the taste of blood where my lip split against my teeth.

What I want to tell you is not what it felt like but what happened next, because that is the part that mattered.

For five years I had absorbed everything — the insults, the demands, the slow erosion of being treated as an appliance that occasionally spoke out of turn.

And in the ringing silence after her hand landed, I understood that I had finally reached the bottom of my own patience, and that there was nothing underneath it.