I have thought a great deal, since, about why I did not read them, because she was moody and it’s the stress of two houses were not stupid explanations — teenagers are moody, and split households are stressful, and a thousand quiet withdrawn evenings really are nothing more than adolescence.

That is what made my failure so easy and so complete: the innocent explanation was always available, always plausible, always right there to reach for, and reaching for it cost me nothing while looking harder would have cost me a great deal.

Because looking harder would have meant considering that the father of my child was capable of cruelty toward his own daughter — and considering that would have meant reopening the custody arrangement, and conflict, and lawyers, and the collapse of the careful peace I had spent four years building.

So every time Maya went quiet, I performed a small, invisible act of self-protection dressed up as good sense: I chose the explanation that let my life stay simple.

I was not lying to myself, exactly.

I was doing something subtler and more common and more dangerous than lying.