“You should have.

Not just tonight.

Thirty-two years of tonights.

You should have stopped him, and you never did.”

For my whole life, my mother had called her silence keeping the peace. She had said it so often that she believed it, that it had become her identity — the gentle woman who kept the family together by never making waves.

But I understood, standing in that restroom, the thing she had never let herself understand: that in our family, her silence had never once been peace.

It had been permission.