This was the part that Crispin — and later Margery, and later still a handful of people who heard only the outline of the story — could never quite absorb: that Lenore had every power to ruin him and chose, deliberately and from the first cold moment in the kitchen, not to.

She could have pulled Havelock’s backing and watched Stroud Enterprises fold inside a quarter.

She could have called in every contract, frozen every line, and let the man who’d erased her learn what erasure actually felt like.

She had the leverage; she had the provocation; no one would have blamed her.

And she wanted none of it, because she had understood something about revenge that Crispin never would: that the elaborate destruction of a person is not the opposite of being controlled by them — it is simply another way of letting them run your life.

To spend her months and her fortune and her considerable will grinding Crispin into dust would have been to keep him at the center of her story, the villain around whom everything still revolved.