Seraphina and her father had stolen from the most vulnerable people imaginable — hurricane survivors, the families of dead officers, the parents of murdered children, and, further back, the trafficked and the lost.

They had taken money that grieving strangers gave in good faith and turned it into beachfront villas and private planes and a two-million-dollar party thrown for the sole purpose of humiliating a woman who had given up part of her body to save a child.

And now the court was taking those villas and those planes and that club and turning them back into what they should have been all along: housing for survivors, restitution for donors, help for the helpless.

Nothing was wasted.

Even the party — even the two million dollars Seraphina had spent to destroy me — had served, in the end, to convict her, and the club she threw it in became a shelter.

I did not feel triumph watching it happen.