I have had to make my peace with those six months of silence, because for a while they shamed me — the knowledge that I had found evidence of a serious crime and sat on it, said nothing, went on setting the table for the people I knew to be criminals.

It looks, from the outside, like cowardice, or complicity, and I judged myself harshly for it before I understood it better.

But I understand now what those six months actually were, and they were not cowardice.

They were the last, desperate work of a woman still trying to save her marriage.

Because to use what I had found — to walk into that family with my evidence and detonate it — would have been to end everything, irrevocably, and some part of me was not yet ready to accept that everything needed ending.

I kept hoping.