Go to bed cross if you have to
Set the resume time
The truce stops the row. The resume time is what makes stopping safe, and it's the part that couples who've tried sleeping on it have usually missed.
Name a time. Not "tomorrow". A time. "Eight, at the table, before the school run." "Half past eight tomorrow evening, before the television." "On the walk after drop-off." Named, specific, and before the low hour arrives again.
Ten minutes. Say the length too. Ten minutes is enough for a row about a dishwasher when the two of you can think, and knowing it's ten minutes makes the appointment keepable. If it needs more, you'll both know by the end of the ten, and you can book more, at another good hour.
The kitchen table. Or wherever the two of you talk best. Not the bedroom, not the sofa the row was on. Somewhere with daylight and a table and coffee, where the morning version can be had as the morning version.
The note. Before bed, one line, on paper, on the side by the kettle. What the row was about, in the words of the person who called the truce. "Dishwasher, and feeling like I do everything." The note is for both of you. It tells eight o'clock what it's for and stops the morning from starting with an argument about what the argument was.
Keep it as though it were a hospital appointment. The first few resume times are the ones that decide whether the truce is ever believed again. Be at the table at eight. Have the ten minutes. If the row has shrunk overnight to nothing, which happens, say so, and have the coffee anyway, because the being there is what's being learned.
Either of you opens it. "It's eight. Shall we?" Not a provocation, an appointment. The presser from chapter 16 doesn't have to be the one who raises it, because raising it isn't raising it. It's keeping it.
An earlier book in this series is about raising difficult things and calls this booking it. The resume time is booking it for a row that's already started, and it works for the same reason. A conversation with a time on it is a conversation that happens, and one without is one that goes into the pile.