I want to hear from Hillary.

She owes us nothing. She can, in good conscience, go to her grave steadfastly refusing to breathe another word about her husband’s decades-old affair with Monica Lewinsky.

But now that Lewinsky has written — eloquently, forcefully and beautifully, I might add — about how the #MeToo movement has helped reframe, in her mind, her infamous affair with then-President Bill Clinton, I’m sort of dying to know what the third party in that affair is thinking.

Women are not responsible for men’s bad behavior — even men to whom they are married. I have not wavered and will not waver in that belief. (Nor do I give much weight to rumors, largely debunked, that Hillary Clinton threatened the numerous women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct.)

But a question has followed the former first lady/U.S. senator/secretary of state/presidential candidate through all her days: Why did she stay?

Love, quite possibly. I’m enough of a hopeless romantic to look at their troubled-at-times union and believe there’s genuine affection, attachment and respect at the center of it — the way Bill spoke about Hillary at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the way they parent Chelsea, their hand-in-hand strolls.

“I love him with my whole heart,” she writes in “What Happened,” her 2017 memoir. “That’s more than enough to build a life on.”

She acknowledged, vaguely, the affairs.

“We’ve certainly had dark days in our marriage,” she writes. “You know all about them — and please consider for a moment what it would be like for the whole world to know about the worst moments in your relationship. There were times that I was deeply unsure about whether our marriage could or should survive. But on those days, I asked myself the questions that mattered most to me: Do I still love him? And can I still be in this marriage without becoming unrecognizable to myself — twisted by anger, resentment or remoteness? The answers were always yes. So I kept going.”

I wonder, now, whether #MeToo has changed the way she views his — and their — past.

In a Vanity Fair essay published Monday, Lewinsky writes:

“Both clinically and observationally, something fundamental changed in our society in 1998, and it is changing again as we enter the second year of the Trump presidency in a post-Cosby-Ailes-O’Reilly-Weinstein-Spacey-Whoever-Is-Next world. The Starr investigation and the subsequent impeachment trial of Bill Clinton amounted to a crisis that Americans arguably endured collectively — some of us, obviously, more than others.”

Are still enduring, I would argue.

“Until recently (thank you, Harvey Weinstein), historians hadn’t really had the perspective to fully process and acknowledge that year of shame and spectacle,” Lewinsky continues. “And as a culture, we still haven’t properly examined it. Re-framed it. Integrated it. And transformed it. My hope, given the two decades that have passed, is that we are now at a stage where we can untangle the complexities and context (maybe even with a little compassion), which might help lead to an eventual healing — and a systemic transformation. As Haruki Murakami has written, ‘When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.’ Who were we then? Who are we now?”

She writes about feeling energized and inspired by the #MeToo movement.

“I am in awe of the sheer courage of the women who have stood up and begun to confront entrenched beliefs and institutions. But as for me, my history, and how I fit in personally? I’m sorry to say I don’t have a definitive answer yet on the meaning of all of the events that led to the 1998 investigation; I am unpacking and reprocessing what happened to me. Over and over and over again.”

I have to believe Hillary Clinton is too.

Her marriage is her business. Her decision to stay with a philandering husband whose behavior I find highly problematic didn’t deter me from voting for her in 2016. I believe, and continue to believe, she would have been an inspiring, effective, fair-minded president.

Still. I found value in the way she acknowledged recently that she regrets keeping on a top aide in her 2008 presidential campaign even after he was accused of sexual harassment.

“Over the past year,” she wrote in a Facebook post, “a seismic shift has occurred in the way we approach and respond to sexual harassment, both as a society and as individuals. This shift was long overdue. It occurred thanks to women across industries who stood up and spoke out, from Hollywood to sports to farm workers — to the very woman who worked for me.”

Now it’s on all of us, she maintained, to examine some our own experiences.

“In other words,” she wrote, “everyone’s now on their second chance, both the offenders and the decision-makers.”

It’s wishful thinking, but I’d love to see her turn that same lens toward her husband’s past treatment of women. It could launch a fascinating, fruitful discussion across America, I think, as so many of us grapple with how to build a more just and equitable culture on a foundation filled with contradictions and cracks.

“I — we — owe a huge debt of gratitude to the #MeToo and Time’s Up heroines,” Lewinsky wrote in Vanity Fair. “They are speaking volumes against the pernicious conspiracies of silence that have long protected powerful men when it comes to sexual assault, sexual harassment and abuse of power.”

Hillary Clinton’s silence protects her marriage and the father of her child. I understand that. I respect that. And I still hope, some day, she finds a reason to break it.

Maybe it would simply breathe oxygen into a narrative she’d prefer to see die. Maybe she knows her words would be twisted and disbelieved and weaponized. Maybe she worries it would wreck her marriage.

But what it if, instead, it put us on a path toward healing from the whole, dark chapter? What if it gave countless other women and men the language they need to grapple with their own dark chapters?

What if now’s the time?

“Public people should be allowed to have private lives too,” Hillary Clinton writes in “What Happened.”

Certainly. Absolutely. But they can also lend essential insight, context and honesty to broader, cultural conversations.

Monica Lewinksky had a million reasons to stay silent on #MeToo, and I’m glad she’s ignored all of them. Hillary Clinton’s voice is the next one I want to hear.