The country club where she had hosted her lavish parties canceled her account.

The woman who had spent decades treating everyone around her as a lower order of person found herself, suddenly, walking into a county courthouse in a plain black suit, dodging local reporters with her coat pulled over her head.

I will not pretend I felt nothing, watching it.

But what I felt was not the hot pleasure of revenge.

It was something colder and more like justice — the specific, quiet satisfaction of watching a person who had believed herself untouchable discover that she was not, that the rules applied to her after all, that the cruelty she had dispensed for decades without cost had finally, at last, met a bill she had to pay.

She had struck a two-year-old and expected, as she had always been able to expect, that it would be smoothed over.