I had thought, going in, that the silence was a wall — solid, unanimous, a thing every single person in the family believed in and defended.

It was not a wall.

It was a spell.

It held only as long as everyone kept casting it, and it depended entirely on each person believing they were the only one who saw.

My cousin had carried her own version alone for thirty years, certain she was the single strange exception, and my aunt had swallowed her suspicion alone, and I had held my box alone, and Lowell had held his, and every one of us had been kept in line not by agreement but by isolation — by the belief that to speak would be to stand alone against a family that was united against us.

The genius of the silence was that it made each of us think we were the only one who wanted it broken.