She could have spoken.

She could have, at any of a thousand dinners, put her hand on my father’s arm and said that’s enough, and I do not believe, in front of guests, he would have defied her.

She never did.

And a bystander who could intervene and chooses not to is not merely a fellow victim.

She is, however gently, a participant.

My mother’s silence felt, to her, like helplessness.

But to me, sitting on the losing end of it my whole childhood, it felt like abandonment, because a child cannot tell the difference between a parent who cannot protect her and a parent who will not, and the effect on the child is identical either way.