People sometimes seem disappointed, when I tell this part, that I do not hate them more — that I cannot offer them the satisfying spectacle of a woman gloating over the ruin of the people who wronged her.

And I understand the impulse; there is a kind of story the world wants, in which the victim becomes the avenger, and drinks deeply of her enemy’s downfall, and it is a satisfying story.

But it was never the story I wanted to be in.

I did not spend three years of my life and every ounce of my resolve to become a person organized around Julian, even in triumph.

Hatred is a kind of attention, and attention is a kind of tether, and I had no intention of spending the rest of my life tethered to the man who forged my body and threw my suitcase in the mud, not even by the rope of my own contempt.

What I wanted was never his suffering.