The choices were theirs.

I had simply, at long last, stopped holding up their walls with my silence.

I want to dwell on this, the question of guilt, because it is the question that torments every whistleblower, every person who finally tells a true thing that brings a powerful structure down, and I have thought hard about the answer.

When a corrupt house collapses and you are the one who spoke the word that started the collapse, there is a voice, insidious and persistent, that whispers: you did this.

You could have stayed quiet.