It puts my mother back at the center, where she belongs, and makes her recovery the point, and Wendy — Wendy falls out of the frame, becomes a piece of administrative business handled by prosecutors and courts, a name on a docket I no longer have to think about.

That is the outcome I wanted, and it is the one I got.

Not Wendy destroyed, though she was.

My mother restored.

There is a whole industry of stories that would have me stand over my defeated enemy and savor it, and I understand the appeal, but it was never what I was after, because savoring Wendy’s downfall would have meant giving her more of my attention, and she had already taken six years of it that she did not deserve.

I was not going to give her a seventh, not even as a villain.