There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.

The line expresses belated recognition: the speaker believes there was an early, decisive point when refusal or resistance was still possible, but that moment passed unnoticed. It captures how agency can feel retroactively lost—not through a single dramatic surrender, but through small omissions, hesitations, or failures to act that accumulate into inevitability. The quote’s power lies in its tragic logic: once events have gathered momentum, the idea of choice becomes a haunting counterfactual (“we could have said no”). It also suggests complicity—missing the moment implies not only bad luck but a shared lapse of attention or courage.