I listened to all of it without a single flicker of malice, and I noticed the absence of the malice the way you notice a pain that has finally, after long months, stopped.

I did not celebrate their smallness.

I took no joy in the assisted-living facility or the supply yard.

Justice had done its work — not to avenge my pride, which had healed on its own, but to make certain that neither of them would ever again be in a position to forge, defraud, or rewrite another human being.

That was the only outcome I had ever wanted.

Everything else was just the paperwork of it.