A lady official who was once in the inner circle of the Palace, who exited last November, right after a certain fugitive ex-congressman went on video saying she was the one who phoned in the Palace’s alleged insertion order, hasn’t said a word since.

Not to the committee. Not to the columnists who came calling. Not even a strongly worded statement through counsel, the standard equipment of the falsely accused. She denied the allegation once, in passing, on her way out the door, and then nothing. Eight months of nothing.

Nosy Tarsee remembers the choreography of that November afternoon well — the last-minute presscon, the delicadeza line, the tandem exit with a certain former chief justice turned executive secretary who also found the door that day. Delicadeza, the Palace called it. A word that used to mean something.

Eight months of that particular silence, and now she’s chairing a bank. A government bank, no less — the Islamic one, chair and CEO, sash and everything, feted by no less than a provincial governor up in Sulu who called her arrival a proud day for Muslim Filipinos everywhere.

Here’s what Nosy Tarsee finds curious: the flood-control committee never actually cleared her name. There was no exoneration, no declaration of insufficient evidence, no formal resolution putting the matter to rest. The allegation simply remains — unresolved, gathering the peculiar kind of dust that settles on inconvenient questions in this town.

Yet her career never seemed to pause for an answer. It merely found a new address: Islamic banking, financial inclusion and other pursuits befitting a technocrat with a development economics degree. None, however, required an accounting of the alleged budget insertion.

If silence is a strategy, it appears to be working remarkably well. Someone might want to inform the other members of the Marcos Cabinet whose reputations were stained by the flood-control controversy that, at least in this case, silence seems to have been more effective than hiring the country’s most expensive lawyers.