I was the mother of a child that man had put out into a killing storm over a lie, and had told not to return until he confessed to a crime he had not committed.

Whatever tolerance, whatever benefit of the doubt, whatever forced politeness I had extended to Arthur Vance across all the years of my marriage, all of it died in that trauma bay, in the space of one sentence, and it has never come back, and I have never once wished that it would.

People sometimes assume, when they hear this story, that I must struggle with the hardness that came over me that night, that a good person ought to feel some pull toward forgiveness, some discomfort at how completely and permanently I closed my heart to Arthur Vance.

I do not.