The person who answers cruelty with crime does not rise above the person who wronged them; they climb down to join them, and they trade places in the eyes of the law, and very often the abuser walks free while the avenger goes to prison, because the abuser was clever and the avenger was only angry.

I was not going to give Preston that.

I was not going to let the man who had already taken so much from me take, as well, my clean hands and my free future by goading me into becoming a criminal in my turn.

The deepest revenge, the only one worth having, was to remain completely innocent while he was fully convicted — to stand at the end of it with nothing on my conscience and nothing on my record, free and clear and clean, while he had a cell and a criminal history and the wreckage of everything he had built on lies.

He wanted to drag me down to where he was.