Sitting in Julian’s dark office with the closed laptop under my hands, I felt it begin, for the first time, to feel like a door.

Everything I had learned was terrible.

And every terrible thing was also a fact I could now act on, a piece of ground I could now stand on, a thing that was no longer able to be done to me in secret because I finally knew it was being done.

Knowledge is a heavy thing to be handed all at once.

But it is lighter, always, than the not-knowing it replaces, because you cannot defend yourself against a blow you refuse to admit is coming.