Rage is loud and expensive and it hands the story to the other side.

What I had instead was quieter and far more final, and it was already loaded, and it did not require me to raise my voice or lift my hand.

I straightened up.

I let go of the rail.

And I looked, one more time, at the man I had come here with.

I have thought since about how close it came — not the fall, though that was close enough, but the other thing, the version of that afternoon where I let the fear become fury and shoved Theodora back and turned the whole event into a brawl between two women that the cameras would have loved and my lawyers would have hated.