I remember making myself a kind of quiet promise at that kitchen table, over the spread of my mother’s documents, and it was not a promise of revenge.

It was a promise of precision.

I promised myself that we would not give Gavin a single thing to point to, not one careless word or hasty action he could hold up later and say, look, they are just as bad, they are out to destroy me.

Everything we did would be lawful, documented, and clean.

We would not break so much as a small rule in the course of stopping him from breaking large ones, because I understood that a man like Gavin thrives on other people’s mistakes, that he would be looking for ours from the first minute, and that the surest way to lose to him was to hand him a grievance he could hide behind.

Our discipline would be our weapon.