I did not *not know.*

I declined to know. There is a difference and it is enormous and it is the entire difference between a victim and a participant, and the law has a phrase for it that I have used myself, in reports, about other people, in a tone of professional contempt.

Willful blindness.

I built the filters at 02:14 because some part of me had been assembling this for two years. I cancelled them at 02:25 because I had a husband and a house and a family that had finally, provisionally, stopped treating me like a quaint addition — and because if that query came back the way I expected it to come back, all of that was over, and I would have to be the one who ended it.

It wasn’t loyalty. I want to be precise, because loyalty would be almost noble.

It was that I was tired, and I was forty, and I did not want to be alone again.