That version was right there, available, and every cell in my body wanted it.

It is the natural response.

Someone nearly kills you and your blood demands that you make them feel it.

But I have spent my professional life in the specific discipline of not doing the natural thing when the natural thing is expensive, and this was the highest-stakes version of that discipline I had ever faced.

Because rage would have handed them the story.

Rage would have made me the unstable one, the scorned girlfriend who lost control on a boat, and it would have buried the only fact that mattered under a cloud of he-said-she-said.