And I used it, and I have never once regretted the fire.

People sometimes ask whether it wasn’t extreme — selling a five-million-dollar house, the work of years, rather than simply changing the locks back and fighting for it.

And I understand the question, but it comes from people who still think the house was the prize.

It wasn’t.

Fighting to keep that estate would have meant fighting to stay inside the exact structure my whole ordeal had been built on — the same rooms where Wendy hosted as though she owned them, the same foyer with Stephanie’s portraits, the same walls Luca had called his compound.

It would have meant winning the house and keeping the poison.