But a few were not.

A cousin I had not spoken to in years wrote to me privately, one line: It happened to me too, at her studio, and I never told anyone. An aunt wrote to say she had always suspected and had always been afraid to ask and was ashamed of that now.

The silence, it turned out, had not been unanimous.

It had only been enforced.

And the moment two people stopped enforcing it, other people discovered they had been waiting, some of them for decades, for permission to stop pretending.

That was the discovery that changed how I understood the whole of it.