It is a comfortable belief.

It lets a great deal of harm run unchecked in the world, because most harm does not require many active participants; it only requires a sufficient number of decent people nearby who have each decided that speaking up is someone else’s job.

Those women had watched my wife scrub floors and my child fetch and carry, and each of them had privately decided it was awkward but not their business, and their collective decision to stay comfortable had been, for a year, the very air my mother’s cruelty breathed.

Innocence is not the absence of action.

My wife understood that in her bones, having lived inside the consequence of it.

The woman on the phone understood it, too late, and had the grace to say so.