It operates not on the hope of changing the cruel person’s heart, which cannot be reliably changed, but on the imposition of a real, external, unavoidable cost — a cost that does not require the cruel person to feel anything, only to face consequences they cannot charm or absorb their way out of.

I could not make Wendy sorry.

I did not try.

What I could do was make her cruelty expensive, through a channel she could not control — and the reason my hands had to stay clean in that banquet room was that accountability only works if the cost falls cleanly on the guilty, and a mother with her own violence on the record muddies the cost, spreads it, gives the guilty somewhere to point.

I kept my hands down so that the cost would land where it belonged, entirely, on the people who had earned it.