I let the recording testify.

I let the federal warrants do their work.

I let a courtroom, in time, deliver the punishment that every cell in my body had wanted to deliver personally with my own hands around Harrison’s throat.

And this was not weakness, and it was not even mercy, exactly.

It was something closer to wisdom, learned late and at great cost: that the satisfaction of personal vengeance is a trap, that it feels like justice and delivers only more wreckage, that a man who answers murder with murder does not defeat his enemies but joins them.

The law is slow, and cold, and unsatisfying in the moment, and it was, in every way that mattered, superior to anything my own hands could have done.