She did something generous and terrible and self-erasing, and she did it out of love, and love is not a thing to be ashamed of even when it is aimed at people who will waste it.

What I have learned is not that she was wrong to be merciful.

She was not.

She was only wrong, over the twelve years that followed, to keep making the same choice on reflex, long after the people it protected had shown her, again and again, exactly what they thought her mercy was worth.

The first act of mercy was beautiful.

It was the ten thousand automatic repetitions afterward, made without ever reconsidering, that slowly turned the beautiful thing into a cage.