I had come to stop being crushed by them.

Those are different errands, and only one of them can truly set you free.

The difference between those two errands is subtle, and I did not understand it clearly until I had lived it, but it turns out to determine everything about who you become on the far side of a betrayal.

To come to destroy someone is to make your freedom depend on their ruin — to say, in effect, I cannot be whole until they are broken, my peace requires their suffering, I will be free when they are punished.

And the terrible trap in that is that it hands the person who hurt you a final, lasting power over you: the power to determine, by their fate, whether you get to be at peace.