It was the readiness of a person who keeps preparing for a betrayal precisely because she cannot stop hoping the betrayal will not come.

And that, I think, is the particular tragedy of the scapegoat, the thing outsiders never understand: we are not weak, and we are not fooled.

We usually see, quite clearly, exactly what our families are.

We keep the evidence.

We know where the bodies are buried.

What keeps us silent is not ignorance and not weakness.

It is hope — the stubborn, irrational, unkillable hope that if we are just good enough, just patient enough, just loyal enough for long enough, the people who hurt us will finally see us and love us the way we have spent our whole lives loving them.

That hope is the real cage.