It is easy, from the outside, to look at a woman who went up a mountain with the man who wanted her dead and think: how could she not have known?

The signs were there.

And they were there.

But the signs were there the way a single wrong note is there in a symphony you have heard a thousand times — technically audible, easily explained away, drowned by the familiar music of a life you trust.

I did not miss the warning signs because I was foolish.

I missed them because seeing them clearly would have required me to believe something no loving person wants to believe about their own husband, and the mind protects itself from that belief with a thousand small, reasonable-sounding explanations.

He’s just stressed about money.

He’s just tired.

He’s just anxious about the baby.

Every individual explanation was plausible.

It was only all of them together, viewed at once, from a ledge, that formed a pattern — and by then it was very nearly too late.

That is how these things work.

They are not hidden in shadow; they are hidden in plain sight, disguised as the ordinary friction of an ordinary marriage, and the disguise works precisely because the alternative is unthinkable.

I am not ashamed anymore that I did not see it sooner.