And he had it exactly backwards, in the way that people like Joe always have it backwards.

The woman he’d married had not been kind.

She had been afraid.

All those years I’d spent absorbing insults with a gentle face, smoothing over his rudeness, making excuses for his mother, never raising my voice — Joe had experienced all of that as kindness, as sweetness, as my good nature, and had come to believe it was simply who I was.

It was not who I was.