The fight ended at 7:02
It’s midnight. The argument was at seven. He’s asleep. You’re lying next to him with your heart going like you’re still in it, drafting the thing you should have said.
The fight, the chemical part of it, was over in about ninety seconds. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard brain scientist, noticed this while relearning everything after a stroke at 37: the surge of a feeling washes through the body and starts to clear in about a minute and a half. Everything after that was her re-running the thought that started it, and every replay poured in a fresh dose.
So you haven’t been angry since seven. You’ve been getting angry again every few minutes for five hours.
Knowing that won’t stop the replay on its own. What stops it are the skills nobody taught you: catching the loop as it starts, widening how much you can feel without flooding, and knowing what anger is trying to tell you once you stop feeding it. That’s Book IV.



