I want to be honest about the sadness, because the story is not really complete without it.

I was not a man who had caught a villain and felt the clean satisfaction of it.

I was a man watching the future he had planned collapse in real time, in front of everyone he knew, and grieving it even as I destroyed it.

I had loved Brenda, or I had loved the person I believed her to be, and I had let myself imagine a whole life on the other side of that afternoon, a fuller house, more children, an end to the long loneliness of raising Hannah alone.

All of that was dying on that lawn as I set the ring down, and I felt every ounce of its weight.