She did not feel vindicated.

She felt the floor of eighteen months tilt under her, because if the part had been bad, if the failure had come from the metal and not from her hands, then the thing she had believed about herself every single day since Gabriel died had been a lie she told in the dark.

She had not failed him.

She had been lied to, the same as he had, by the same man.

It took her a long time to be able to feel that as relief rather than as a fresh kind of horror, because at first it was only horror.