“Maybe I’m just not making the sense you want me to make.” Some kind of strength—a type I hadn’t known I possessed until now—wrought itself like steel into those words. I wasn’t shaking. My throat wasn’t closing, and the fist inside my middle let go, wiggling fingers free.

He jumped up and then took three huge steps toward me and then slammed his hand onto the dining room table. A set of charcoals fell to the floor; a pencil skittered across the wooden top.

A new breed of rage formed inside my chest. I would not and could not allow him to use my emotions to appease his desperate need for control. If I relinquished my own strength here, it would be the final time: I’d never again be able to stand up and say what I believed was true; I would again choose to calm him. My vehement surety was also slight and fragile, a small green shoot above the clods of Alabama soil that could be easily torn, stomped, or ripped. I protected this new growth. “Please leave,” I said.

“Anything you want, Ellie. Anything you want. That’s what I thought I’d been giving you all these years—anything you want. You’re telling me that everything I’ve given you isn’t enough.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t enough.” I held up my hand. “I won’t do this. I won’t defend myself against things I didn’t say. Please, please leave.”

“You’re losing your real life, Ellie. Me. You’re losing me. You’re losing your life and your friends while you hang out with these people you call friends who you don’t even know. Is that what you want?”

“I know I want you to leave,” I said.

“Shit, Ellie, at least you know something.”

His footsteps were concrete blocks thumping against the hardwood floors. He reached the front door and turned, staring at me for the longest moment, and then slammed the door as he left. The framed nautical sketch to the left of the front door fell, shattering. I stood still, listening to his car start, and then there was the crunch of gravel as he drove away.

I shook, from my hair to my feet. I allowed this earthquake of a shifting life to pass through me, and then I grabbed the broom from the kitchen and cleaned up the glass, placed the picture on the kitchen counter, and sipped the last of the wine.

What else, really, was there to do?

Excerpt from Lillian Ashford Eddington’s Journal
New Year’s Eve 1962
Twenty-two Years Old