And she had let them believe she’d been silenced, when in fact she had only been waiting, gathering, learning exactly how the machine was wired so that when the time came she would know which cable to cut.

“For years,” she said, “I told myself that saying nothing was keeping the peace.

It wasn’t.

It was keeping you safe.

I was the reason none of this ever caught up with you.

I’ve stopped doing that now.