Camellia had done a monstrous thing, and she would answer for it, and that was right — but she had also lost her own son, and would live inside both of those facts for the rest of her life, and there is no part of that from which any decent person could take satisfaction.

I did not hate her, in the end, as much as I might have expected to.

I grieved, in some strange way, for all of it.

Justice is not the same thing as joy, and anyone who confuses the two has never actually watched it done.

I say this because the world seems to want, from a story like mine, a particular kind of ending — the ending where the wronged woman stands in the courtroom and feels the hot, clean rush of vengeance as the gavel comes down, where the villains’ downfall is a triumph she drinks deeply of, where justice tastes like winning.

And I understand the appetite for that ending; there is a rough, satisfying shape to it.