We did all of it through proper channels, and I took a cold satisfaction in that, because proper channels were exactly what Damon had counted on me being too broken to use.

There is a temptation, when someone has wronged you the way that family wronged me, to answer them in kind — to become, for a while, as lawless and vicious as they were, because it feels like the only response equal to the size of the injury.

I felt that temptation.

There were nights, in those seven weeks, feeding my daughter at three in the morning, when I imagined uglier things than a courtroom: confrontations, exposures, a scorched and total ruin delivered by my own hand.

But I came to understand that the law was not the weak, slow, disappointing thing I had always half-assumed it to be.