People expect revenge to feel hot, and when it does not, they assume something is wrong with them.

But real accounting is never hot.

The satisfaction of a clean ledger is not the satisfaction of having hurt someone; it is the satisfaction of a thing being finally, exactly true — of the numbers matching the world at last after a long time of not matching it.

For eight months a lie had sat on my books: the lie that I was less than I was, that a family who had never looked at me had the standing to measure me, that a man who loved me at a discount was a man who loved me.

Every day I had let that lie stand, I had carried a small silent deficit, a gap between how I was treated and what was true.

And now the gap was closed.