Peace.

I thought about how long I had confused tolerance with love.

How often I had paid to be diminished.

How easily people accepted my generosity as an obligation and my silence as permission.

The reunion had not ruined my marriage.

It had revealed what my marriage already was.

And the strangest aftershock of all was this: I no longer wondered whether I had been too harsh.

I wondered why I had ever worked so hard to be understood by people committed to misunderstanding me.

Maybe that was the biggest red flag from the beginning.

Not that Damen lied so smoothly, or that Nikki slipped so easily into my place, but that both of them believed I would accept it if they said it calmly enough.

They were wrong.

And I think that was the first honest thing our marriage ever gave me.