I have thought a great deal since about the woman I was in that half-minute, and I’m proud of her, though she was terrified.

Everything in me wanted to sit up and scream, to throw the water pitcher, to make him look at what he’d said out loud in the light of my face.

And some quieter, colder part of me — the part, I think, that was already becoming a mother in the fullest sense — understood that a scream would spend everything for nothing.

A scream would warn him.