I don’t check.

I used to imagine I’d feel something the day I stopped thinking about him, some flare of triumph, and instead the truth arrived quietly and without ceremony, the way real freedom does: one afternoon I simply noticed that I hadn’t.

I kept the company under my father’s holding name — Ardent, his word, chosen decades ago for reasons he never explained and I never asked — and I built it into something he would not recognize and would, I think, be proud of.

That is the part the revenge fantasy leaves out entirely, the part that turned out to matter more than any reckoning: that once the war was over, there was still the whole rest of a life to build, and building it was the actual point.

The gala, the switch, the atrium, the binder — all of that was subtraction, the clearing away of a man who had grown over my life like ivy over a window until I’d forgotten there was light on the other side.

Clearing him away was necessary.