Each additional silence confirmed it.

By the time they were dividing up my bedroom, they were not being cruel in their own minds, or not only cruel; they genuinely believed, on the accumulated evidence of a hundred unopposed intrusions, that I was a person who did not defend her space, and that taking it was therefore not a violation but simply the way our family worked.

I had, through nothing but exhausted silence, taught them that lesson myself.

This is the cruel bind of the grieving and the depleted: the very state that makes you unable to defend your boundaries is read, by the people crossing them, as consent to their crossing.