By every external measure, the account was balanced.

And yet.

No court order and no public disgrace could give me back my daughter.

No trust fund could give Noah the mother he never met.

The deepest wound in this story, the one at the very center, is not one that any justice can heal, because Chloe is still gone, and she is going to stay gone, and the man’s downfall does not change that by one inch.

So I have made my peace with a smaller, truer kind of justice than the movies promise.