My silence had never bought her safety.
It had only ever bought their comfort.
I had been paying, for six years, into an account that protected everyone in that house except the one person I’d told myself I was protecting.
The math had been wrong from the very first day.
And the strange thing, the thing I still can’t fully explain, is that once I saw it, I wasn’t afraid anymore.
Terror needs a future you’re trying to protect.
I had just watched mine come apart on the marble, and out of the wreckage stepped a woman I hadn’t been in six years — one who had nothing left to lose by being exactly who she was.
Chapter 2 — Six Years of Silence
To understand how a woman lets her life come to that floor, you have to understand what I had traded, and why.
For six years I had lived in a mansion in Bel Air as a kind of permitted guest in my own marriage.