When you’re exhausted, your tone talks before you can edit it. Say it first: “I’m tired, not mad.”

Exhaustion leaks out through your voice before your judgment catches up. The sentence is fine and the delivery is flat and clipped, and the person across from you reads the delivery and concludes you are angry at them. Then you spend the evening defending a mood you never meant to express.

Say it at the start, before the first short answer, and name the real cause. One line does it: you are wiped out and it is not about them. That gives the other person something to read your tone against, which is usually all they needed.