“No,” she said. “You stopped later, didn’t you. I could see it on you when you walked in.”

There is a thing that happens when you have hated someone in the abstract for twenty years and then they turn out to be a limited, tired, frightened woman with a laundry job and a dead sister who made one bad call on the advice of a caseworker in 2005.

You don’t get to keep the hate. That’s the discovery. It has nowhere to go and you have been carrying it as though it were structural.

I wanted her to be a villain. She would have been so much more useful as a villain.

In the car afterward Sabrina said, “Well.”

“Yes.”