And if I had — if I had given in to that hot, righteous, entirely understandable impulse — I would not have been standing on that driveway watching them leave.

I would have been the one leaving.

There would have been a competing story, a bruise on an old woman to match the sting on my face, a muddied question of who assaulted whom, a legal fight instead of a legal certainty.

The single most satisfying thing I could have done in that moment of being struck was also the single thing that would have cost me everything.

And the single least satisfying thing — standing still, keeping my hands down, saying a quiet sentence and walking out — was the thing that won me the whole war.

That is the lesson I took from the entire ordeal, and it is the opposite of the lesson the moment seemed to offer.