She had assaulted me, on camera, in my own home, entirely unprovoked by any physical act on my part.

In doing so she had triggered a clause in a contract she did not know existed, and had forfeited more than she could imagine.

All I had to do to collect was to keep my own hands still.

The hardest thing I did that day was the thing that looked, from the outside, like doing nothing.

It was not nothing.

It was the whole victory, secured in a single held breath.