Justice is not a resurrection.

It does not give back what was taken.

Sterling in a cell for the rest of his life did not put Gabriel back in the sky, did not return eighteen months to her, did not undo a single hour of the guilt she had carried for nothing.

What it did was smaller and realer: it stopped him.

It took a person who had twice turned human lives into line items and placed him somewhere he could never do it again, and it did so by the patient public accounting of a society that had decided such things would be answered for.

That was all justice had ever been, she saw now, and it was enough, and it was better than the hot private thing she had wanted, because the hot private thing would have cost her a piece of her soul to collect and this had cost her nothing but the willingness to let the right people do their work.