I looked at the envelope in my hand, at the name of the man who had spent years making me feel small, now reduced to begging me for twenty percent, and what I felt was not anger, and not triumph, and not petty joy.

What I felt was nothing.

A deep, clean, weightless nothing.

He simply did not have the power to make me feel anything anymore, in any direction, and I understood, holding that envelope, that this weightlessness was the truest freedom of all — not the freedom of having beaten him, but the freedom of no longer being connected to him by any feeling at all, not even hatred.

I did not open it.