I did not post about it online. I want to note this explicitly because the impulse was there, a few times, particularly in the first month when I was most angry and most raw. The impulse to say something public, to have the truth of what happened witnessed by people outside the family — that was real. I sat with it and I did not act on it. Partly because I understood that public framing of the situation would affect the process in ways I could not predict, and partly because I was not sure that what I wanted in those moments was actually justice, and I did not want to do something in service of something that was not quite justice.
The conversations I did have were with Tessa, with Luke, with the lender, with the FTC, with the lawyer. They were all necessary. They were all useful. They were the right conversations to have.
I am glad, in retrospect, for the conversations I did not have. Restraint is not always the right answer — sometimes the right answer is to involve more people, to make things visible, to use every resource available. But in this case, keeping the circle small kept me in control of my own story, and that mattered.
## What My Job Knew and Didn’t
I did not tell anyone at work what was happening. My coworkers knew that I was ‘dealing with some family stuff’ because I was slightly more tired than usual for a few weeks and because I declined a few after-work things I might otherwise have gone to. No one pressed me on the specifics, which is a characteristic of the particular office culture I work in — people are friendly and they don’t pry — and I was grateful for it.