And then, when I was finished, I dried my eyes, and I picked up the phone, because that woman was gone, and the woman who had taken her place did not weep.

She planned.

I have wondered, since, whether it was cold of me — to move so quickly from weeping to planning, to feel the marriage die and, within the same hour, begin engineering the destruction of the people who had killed it.

And I have decided that it was not cold.

It was survival, and it was, in its own way, the healthiest thing I have ever done.

Because for ten years, in the face of that family’s cruelty, I had done the opposite.