The unsent draft can be kinder than the truth or simply more afraid of its consequences.

Restraint has two faces and they look identical from the outside. The thing you did not send may have spared someone real harm, or it may have spared you a difficult conversation, and the silence looks the same either way, which is why it is so easy to call cowardice kindness. Motive is the only difference and motive is invisible.

Ask yourself plainly whose comfort the silence protects. If the answer is theirs, let it stay unsent. If the answer is yours, consider that the conversation is not cancelled, only postponed, and that a smaller, calmer version of it now will cost less than the version that arrives on its own later.