It was such a small wound.

But standing over the sink with it, watching a thread of red bloom into the dishwater, she had felt something come loose in her — not dramatically, not with any decision she could have named in the moment, but the way a held breath finally releases when you stop deciding to hold it.

She had spent eight years bleeding in small, invisible ways over that sink, and she had always, always cleaned it up before anyone could see.

The cut finger was nothing.

What was different, this time, was that she looked at the blood on the napkin and the glass on the floor and understood, with a calm that surprised her, that she was not going to clean it up.

Not tonight, and not the next night, and not ever again.