I chose not to hear it.

This is the part of my own story I have had to make peace with, the part that is not about George’s villainy but about my own long complicity in not-seeing, and it is, I have come to believe, the most common and most human failing there is.

We do not usually miss the warning signs about the people closest to us.

We see them, and then we unsee them, because seeing them clearly would require us to act, and acting would mean upending a life we have built, admitting we married wrong, blowing up the family we made, and all of that is so painful, so costly, so frightening, that it is easier, in the moment, to decide that the flicker meant nothing, that we imagined it, that we are being paranoid, that we should trust our family a little more.