It was only the shape the truth happened to take on this particular night.

People have wanted me to call it revenge, and I understand the appeal of the word, but it has never fit.

Revenge is something you go out and take.

What happened in that ballroom was something I allowed to arrive — the lawful, scheduled, entirely earned consequence of choices other people had made freely over a period of years — and the only active thing I did was decline, at long last, to keep standing between those people and the results of what they had done.

Chapter 14 — Escorted Out