A revenge is something you do to another person.

It is an act of aggression, a wound you choose to inflict, and it makes you, however justified, a party to the harm — it ties you to the person you take it against, sometimes more tightly than the original injury did, because now you have your own guilt to carry alongside their crime.

I did not want that.

I had spent twenty-two years bound to my family by their cruelty, and I was not interested in staying bound to them by mine.

So I was very careful, in those cold weeks, to do a different thing.

I did not fabricate anything.