Then she said something I will never forget.

“Sometimes abuse lasts for years just because the people standing nearby convince themselves that staying silent is the same as being innocent.”

I have carried that sentence with me ever since, because it indicted me as much as it indicted any of the women at those tables — more, in fact, since I was not a guest but the husband, the father, the one person in the world with both the standing and the duty to stop it.

The bystanders at least had the thin excuse of being outsiders in someone else’s home.

I had no excuse at all.

And Aurora’s line named the exact mechanism of my failure: the quiet, respectable belief that as long as I was not the one being cruel, I was not implicated in the cruelty.