And the true sign that the war was over, and won, was not that I felt victorious looking at him.

It was that I felt nothing looking at him, because you cannot feel victorious over someone who has become irrelevant, any more than you feel victorious over the weather.

He had shrunk, in my inner life, from a monster to a footnote, and there is no feeling you can have toward a footnote except the mild, distant, unbothered acknowledgment that it exists.

That nothing, I understood driving my thoughts back inside with the pizza, was the most complete victory a person can win over someone who once had power over them: not to defeat them in a way that still requires your passion, but to arrive at the place where they no longer command any of it.