A person’s silence about a subject is not an invitation to fill the space with guesses.

When someone leaves a topic alone, the gap tends to get filled by everyone else’s theories. No news about the job, the relationship, the test results, and a story appears anyway, assembled from fragments and repeated until it sounds like fact. Silence usually means the person is still deciding, still hurting, or simply does not owe an account. Guessing out loud takes that choice away from them.

When you notice a blank in someone’s story, let it stay blank. If you genuinely need to know something, ask them directly and accept whatever answer comes. And when a guess reaches you about someone else, decline to pass it along.