I wiped the blood from my mouth with the back of my hand, and the sting of it only made my thinking sharper.

I didn’t answer them.

Silence, I had learned, is the one thing people like that cannot argue with.

I walked past them, down the hall to the bedroom, and shut the door on their gloating.

In the mirror I looked at what they had done — the swelling already coming up along my cheek, the split lip — and I felt, underneath the wreckage, something I had not felt in five years: the first clean lift of relief.

I pulled my suitcase to the center of the floor and packed like a person who had thought about it before.