The last I ever gave Marius was my attention, and I took even that back on my way to the door.

I have thought a great deal, in the years since, about the version of me that wanted more.

She was real, and she was not wrong to want it; there is nothing shameful in the fantasy of watching the man who tried to erase you spend his life laboring under your heel.

But I have come to believe that fantasy is a trap dressed as a triumph.

Revenge, the elaborate kind, the personal kind, is not a way of putting a thing behind you.

It is a way of keeping it in front of you forever — a lifelong appointment you make with the worst thing that ever happened to you, a commitment to remain, in some private chamber of yourself, always the woman on the ballroom floor.