I became completely silent.
Too silent, perhaps.
I walked down the hallway of our small house in a suburb near Columbus, Ohio, closed my bedroom door as softly as I could—as if I didn’t want to wake a sleeping child—and lay down on my half of the bed, still fully dressed.
My cheek throbbed where his ring had caught bone. My lip tasted like metal. My left shoulder ached from where I had slammed into the hallway wall after the first blow, the second one less a strike than a shove meant to finish the argument by reminding me who got the last word in our house.
His name was Tyler Dalton, and for three years I had spent a dangerous amount of energy learning how to narrate him kindly.
He wasn’t always like this.
He had a temper, but work was hard.
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