It was management.

I want to be fair to them, because most of them were not monsters, and understanding what they were is more useful than hating them.

They were ordinary people who had been handed an unbearable choice a long time ago and had made the ordinary human decision, which was to look away.

To believe me fully would have meant reckoning with the fact that they had watched two children be hurt for years and had said nothing — that the casseroles and the church pews and the spotless respectability had all been built on top of something they had chosen not to see.

That is an enormous thing to ask a person to admit about themselves, and most people, faced with it, will do what my family did: they will decide, quickly and beneath conscious thought, that it is easier to doubt the one who spoke than to indict everyone who stayed silent, themselves included.

Their loyalty to my mother was not really loyalty to my mother.