And having chosen it once, the second day’s choice was harder, because now she had known for two days and said nothing, and the confession would have to account for that.

And the third day was harder still.

This is how good people, or people who are not purely evil, end up committing monstrous acts by omission: not through a single wicked decision, but through a thousand small daily choices to postpone a reckoning that grows more terrifying with each postponement.

Every month Beatrice stayed silent, the wall between her and the truth grew one course of bricks higher, until the prospect of confession became a thing so enormous she could no longer imagine surviving it, and so she simply never did, and the babies became toddlers, and the toddlers became children, and five years passed inside a silence that had never once been actively chosen, only never broken.

It was, Alex understood, the exact same cowardice that had let him never look back, never wonder, never dig, for six years.