But somewhere along the way I noticed the fantasy had a cost, which was that it kept me tethered to Elke Trask, kept a version of her living rent-free in my head, kept the shape of my own healing dependent on her someday getting what she deserved.

I did not want to give her that.

The truest freedom I found, in the end, was not the freedom of watching her fall; it was the freedom of no longer needing to.

Her fall, when it came, would come through the slow machinery that catches people like her — the audits and the subpoenas and the courtrooms, grinding along in offices I would never sit in, on a schedule that had nothing to do with my grief and asked nothing of me.

That is how it actually works, and it is less satisfying than the fantasy and infinitely better, because it means the justice does not depend on you, does not require you to organize your life around someone else’s punishment, does not hold your peace hostage to their ruin.