And then she said, looking over at Leo taking his clumsy steps across the living room, “I hope that one day he truly understands the harm he caused.”

“Do you feel sorry for him?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“But I refuse to waste another second of my life hating him.”

And I understood, hearing it, that my daughter had arrived somewhere I had not fully arrived at myself — somewhere past both forgiveness and revenge, in the clean open country beyond them.

She had not forgiven Derek; she was too clear-eyed for that, and he had not earned it.

But she had done something harder and healthier than forgiveness, which was to reclaim the enormous amount of herself that hating him would have continued to cost.