What do you do when the footnote becomes the truth?

I was translating a memoir last week, and halfway through, I realized the footnotes weren’t just clarifications—they were the real story. The author’s hand trembled on the margin, not in doubt, but in confession. Now I keep thinking: what if every translator is just a witness to something they weren’t meant to hear? Not the text, but the silence behind it. What do you do when the thing you’re supposed to translate is the thing that never got said?