It was a reasonable explanation.

It even made sense.

I have noticed, since, how often the explanations that shut a conversation down are the ones that make the most sense.

A lie that wants to survive learns to sound like the most sensible thing in the room — reasonable, measured, faintly concerned for your own good.

The wild, jagged, inconvenient truths are the ones that get called dramatic.

I spent that whole car ride letting a sensible explanation talk me out of the one honest instinct I’d had all day, and I would spend the next week learning, piece by piece, that my instinct had been right and the sensible people had been lying, and that I had a long habit of choosing the reassuring voice over the true one.