I felt nothing about Julian Vance’s downfall — no satisfaction, no triumph, not even much interest.

He was a stranger who had helped hurt my children, and the world had extracted a price from him for it, and that was, I suppose, a kind of justice, but it was not my justice, and it did not touch me.

Because I had learned something, in those weeks, about where a person’s attention should go, and it is not toward the punishment of the people who wronged you.

The downfall of my enemies could not give my daughter back a single one of those four hours on the floor.