Leo

The apology that was never offered sits in a different category than the ones that were given badly or too late. It belongs to the family of things that were withheld not from cruelty but from a fundamental misreading of what you needed. The person who should have apologized saw your hurt and thought what you wanted was understanding, or space, or proof that they cared in some other way. They kept giving you everything except the simple admission that they had gotten it wrong. What you actually wanted was not complex, and that might be the hardest part to forgive.