Endurance is what you are left with when they don’t.

She had not been devoted for eight years.

She had merely endured — endured for people who mistook her endurance for permission, who had watched her absorb every insult and concluded, reasonably enough, that a woman who never pushed back could be pushed as far as they liked.

The kiss beside the limousine had not broken anything.

It had simply turned on a light in a room she had kept dark on purpose, and in that light she could finally see the whole shape of what she had been calling her marriage.

She thought about the woman she had been eight years ago, and how little of her was left.