He Spent a Year Paying a Doctor to Write Down a Fragile, Unstable Version of Me That Didn’t Exist — So When He Finally Set Me Aside, the Whole World Would Believe I’d Simply Come Apart on My Own

That sentence of hers — because I was afraid of the answer — became a kind of teacher to me, because it named something I had needed to understand not only about Sabrina but about myself, and about the whole machine that had run for five years around me.

There is a way of not-knowing that is innocent, the simple absence of information.

And there is another way of not-knowing that is a choice — the careful arrangement of your own attention so that the thing you suspect can never quite become a thing you know, because knowing it would force you to act, and acting would cost you something you are not willing to lose.

That second kind of not-knowing is not innocence.