Everyone always asks about the person who did the harm, as if she is the whole explanation, and she is not.

The whole explanation includes me — the uncle who loved those kids and stayed away for three years because a series of reasonable-sounding messages asked him to, because pushing felt rude, because he told himself that respecting a closed door was the same as respecting a family.

It was not.

And there are children right now behind other quiet doors, and other decent relatives standing on other porches leaving gifts and telling themselves it isn’t their place, and if I could reach every one of them I would say only this: your discomfort is information.

The wrongness you feel when a family goes dark and won’t let you in is not something to apologize for.