“I am not running away. Please try and understand. Please.” I leaned into his palm. “I’m going.”

He yanked his hands away and threw them in the air, as if he were a referee at a championship football game and someone had just scored the winning field goal. The veins in his neck bulged; his lips were thin and white; his brow furrowed with squinted eyes. My stomach flipped over and my throat clenched. I looked away and across the room to the oil painting of Lil and me. She was two years old in this picture and she sat on my lap, her face lifted to mine, smiling.

The silence with Rusty was another language completely. It wasn’t so much about the words and sentences that would come after the silence, it was what grew inside him and in the unspeaking space between us: rage.

“I really don’t want you to go,” Rusty said, and stood. He walked over to my suitcase, calmly threw a pile of clothes toward me, then dumped the remainder onto the floor.

I buried my face in my hands; I couldn’t watch him do this. He walked out of the bedroom with a slam of the door that shook the oil painting. I walked toward the frame and straightened it, and then I knelt onto the plush cream carpet and repacked my suitcase.

The house was quiet with the hum of the air conditioner, which was a white noise to the pain across my chest as I then carried a pile of clothes to the laundry room. He’d say sorry; he always did.

And this is what I saw in that moment standing in my tiled laundry room: a huge block of marble, one I had given Rusty on our wedding day—a pure white block of flawless marble. With every temper tantrum, with every cruel word and disregard, with every time he held up his hand and told me not to argue, he had chipped away a piece of that solid rock. In my hand now I held a single crushed pebble.

I stood in the laundry room writing a list of things that needed to be done while I was gone when his footsteps approached. I stopped and waited. He entered the laundry room and came to me, pulled me into his arms. “God, baby. I’m sorry. That was ridiculous, throwing clothes. I’m an idiot. I just can’t stand to think of you not being in this house. If you need to go to Bayside, please go. But know how much I’ll miss you.”

“Thanks.” I pulled away and tossed a load of whites into the washing machine, then yanked a pile from the dryer and began to fold.

“Let’s have a glass of wine and sit on the back porch. It’s a gorgeous night.”

I nodded with my back to him. “Sure, in a minute.”

“Forget it,” he said.