I looked at Grantham. At the man I had married for love. The man whose family I had fed, financed, forgiven, and accommodated for eleven years. He lowered his gaze toward his plate as though something on the tablecloth mattered more than his wife’s stunned face.

Something inside me that had been splitting for more than a decade finally broke.

I set my fork down. Slowly, I wiped my hands on the napkin, moving with the strange calm that comes when the body needs time to catch up with a decision the mind has already made.

Then I reached across the table and returned the slap once.

The gasp that swept the room nearly made me laugh. They reacted as though I had violated something sacred — as though Willamina’s strike had been discipline while mine was rebellion.

I stood. I looked at Grantham, not his mother or his sister. “A husband who cannot defend his wife in front of a room full of people does not deserve to remain her husband.”