Instead she tore it down and stood in the rubble, as excluded as she had ever been, having gained nothing but the brief attention of cameras that had already moved on.

I did not gloat.

I had come too close to being made hollow myself to enjoy watching it happen to her.

There was a moment, near the end, when Silvia came to see me.

She was out of the red coat by then, out of the triumphant posture she’d worn on the courthouse steps, and she looked like what she was underneath all of it: a woman who had organized her entire life around a wound, and had finally been given the chance to avenge it, and had discovered that avenging it healed nothing at all.

“I thought I would feel different,” she said.