It was loyalty to their own innocence.

If I was lying or exaggerating, then they had done nothing wrong all those years.

If I was telling the truth, then they had.

And so they needed me to be lying, and they arranged their belief accordingly, because the alternative was a mirror none of them could bear to look into.

I realized, reading those messages, that I had grown up not in a family that failed to see, but in a family that saw perfectly well and had made a collective, decades-long decision that the comfort of the adults was worth more than the safety of the children.

My mother was the one who swung the belt.