Their punishment was not my meal; it was simply the truth, arriving.

They were where they belonged, locked away, stripped of their money and their status and their illusions, living inside the consequences of their own choices.

And I was here, in a bright office that smelled of jasmine, living inside the reality of mine.

That was the whole of it.

Not vengeance, in the end, but a clean and final separation: they to their consequences, and I to my life.

I found I had no more need to think about them at all.