She had kissed my husband under a banner and laughed while I lay on the floor, and by every right I should have hated her.

But when I looked at the whole arc of it clearly, I saw a woman who had made the same wager I once had, only more cheaply — who had looked at Rupert Brandt and seen a rising man and decided to attach herself to his rise, believing that proximity to power was the same as having it.

She had been wrong about him in exactly the way I had been wrong about him eight years before, and it had cost her exactly what it costs: everything, at the worst possible moment, in public.

I did not forgive her.

But I stopped needing to hate her, which is a different and more useful thing.

Hatred would have kept a piece of me tied to that ballroom forever.

I had spent quite enough of my life tied to men and their mistakes.

I was not going to spend the rest of it tied to a woman and hers.

The thing I had wanted, it turned out, was never revenge.

Revenge would have been confronting Rupert the night I opened that safe.