I do not celebrate cruelty, and I took no pleasure in anyone’s suffering for its own sake.

But I will admit to a certain hard satisfaction in the symmetry of it, in the two of them finally getting to experience what they had inflicted on me for years: the particular vertigo of discovering that the confident story you have been telling yourself about your own life was, all along, a lie that everyone but you already knew.

They gave me that vertigo for fifteen years.

They got it back in a single hour, at Union Depot, walking through a set of glass doors into a truth that had been waiting for them for two days.