What I had wanted was never Leon suffering; it was Leon stopped — stopped from taking anything more, from anyone, ever again — and the guilty plea did that, cleanly and permanently, and so the wanting simply ended.

I did not gloat.

I did not attend the sentencing to watch.

I had spent a year holding the whole terrible weight of it, and when it was over, I mostly felt the strange lightness of setting down a thing you have carried so long you have stopped noticing its weight, and noticing it only in its sudden absence.

Dahlia divorced him before the sentencing.

She surrendered the condominium and the jewelry and the car, all of it bought with our father’s money, and I never learned what became of her afterward and did not especially need to.