Because Barrett’s ruin, once it was underway, was not very interesting to me.

It turned out I had never really wanted his downfall.

I had wanted my freedom, and my daughter’s safety, and my own name back over my own door, and those things had required, as a matter of plain mechanics, that I stop protecting him from the consequences of what he had done — but the consequences themselves were his, not mine, and I found I did not want to sit and warm my hands at them.

There is a version of a woman in my position who spends the rest of her life defined by the man who wronged her, curating her grievance, keeping the wound open because the wound is proof.