When My Ex-Husband Brought His Young Mistress to Our Son’s Pool Party to Humiliate Me, I Introduced Everyone to My Handsome New “Boyfriend” — He Laughed and Called It Pathetic, Certain I’d Hired an Actor, Until the Man Opened a Small Case and Said One Sentence That Drained the Color From His Face

And for nine years I had mistaken his loudness for strength, had shrunk before it, had assumed the person doing the shouting was the person with the power.

It is an easy mistake; the world makes it constantly, handing its deference to whoever is most sure of themselves and most willing to say so.

But loudness is not strength.

Very often it is the opposite — a performance staged precisely to keep anyone from looking too closely at what’s underneath, a noise made to fill a space that would otherwise show how little is there.

Luke was loud because loud was all he had.