But my grandfather’s voice was in my ear the whole time — don’t use this power simply because you’re angry — and when I was honest with myself, I understood that sending them to prison would have given them the one thing I most wanted to deny them: a way to feel like victims.

In a cell, my father could tell himself he had been destroyed by a cruel and vindictive daughter, a broken system, an injustice.

He could nurse his grievance and keep his self-image intact.

Restitution gave him no such comfort.

It left him to live, every single day, in the plain, un-dramatic, inescapable reality of his own choices and their consequences — a smaller house, a lost title, a name he had damaged himself.

There is no heroic story a man can tell himself about that.