So I do not disown the vengeance.

It saved me, in its way, as surely as the smartwatch did.

But here is the thing about vengeance that I learned, slowly, as the months passed and the trial concluded and the sentences came down: it is fuel, and fuel is meant to be burned.

It is not meant to be a permanent condition.

If you cling to it after it has done its work, after the justice it drove you toward has been achieved, it stops being fuel and becomes poison, keeping you forever tethered to the people who hurt you, forcing you to keep them alive in your mind so that you can go on hating them, which is a way of letting them continue to occupy your life long after they have left it.

And so, somewhere in those six months, my vengeance did the honest thing that vengeance should do but rarely does: it burned all the way down, and consumed itself, and went out.