Their life had been insolvent for years; my payments had simply concealed the insolvency, had functioned as a kind of scaffolding that held up a building with no real foundation, and made it look, from the street, like a sound house.

When I removed the scaffolding, the building did not collapse because I removed the scaffolding.

It collapsed because it had never been able to stand, and the scaffolding had only been hiding that fact, from them and from the world.

I did not ruin them.

I revealed them.

I stopped spending my own resources to sustain an illusion of solvency that they had no right to and could not maintain, and the reality underneath, which had been there the whole time, became visible.

A person is not responsible for the collapse of a thing that was only ever standing because she held it up at her own expense.