She was done putting him at the center of anything.

She did not want him ruined.

She wanted him accountable — which is a smaller and far more precise thing, and which requires no cruelty at all, only the quiet removal of a privilege he had mistaken for a right.

The hundreds of people who worked at Stroud had done nothing to her.

She would not burn their livelihoods to make a point to one man who had never once, in eight years, thought to ask what her silence cost her.

Chapter 19 — The Same Old Tone