To be arrested in your own home, named in your own town’s paper, made to sit in a courtroom while the evidence of what you did is read aloud, to lose your freedom and your reputation and your comfortable lies all at once and go on living inside the wreckage of them for years — that is a punishment the darkness cannot touch, because the person has to be alive and present to endure it.

Samantha did not choose the law because she was too gentle for revenge.

She chose it because she understood, more clearly than I ever had with all my terrible experience, that the law was the more complete revenge, and the only one that left the avenger clean.

She wanted the Harringtons to live every single day of the ruin they had earned.

And she wanted the man she loved to walk out of it still a man she could love.