But a woman’s blood-pressure medication is not a consequence; it is a life, and I was not in the business of ending lives, only of ending my own exploitation.

So I made a single quiet call — not to my mother, whom I did not speak to, but to a pharmacy — and I arranged, anonymously, through Fitz’s office, that her prescription would be covered for as long as she needed it, by a fund she would never be able to trace to me.

She never knew.

She spent that morning screaming into my voicemail that I was letting her die, and by that afternoon her medication was quietly paid for, and she never learned that the daughter she had abandoned had made sure of it while refusing to pick up the phone.

I did not do it for her gratitude; she would never know to give any.

I did it because there is a difference between refusing to fund a lifestyle and refusing to fund a life, and I intended to be a person who knew that difference even when the people who wronged me had forgotten it entirely.