The cold I felt that morning was real, and it was cruel, and it was theirs to answer for.

But making them feel the same cold would not have removed one degree of it from my own past.

It would only have added more cold to the world, and tied me, permanently, to the people I most wanted to be free of, because you cannot spend your life pushing someone into the snow without standing at the edge of the snow yourself, watching, forever.

Revenge, done that way, is just a colder room you agree to live in so that your enemy has to live in it too.

And I did not want a colder room.

I had spent enough of my life cold.