“I did that for far too long.”

For five years his eyes had been the mirror I checked myself in — the place I went to learn whether I’d done well or badly, whether I was too much or not enough, whether the thing I remembered had really happened.

And looking into them now, with officers holding his arms and the mask gone and nothing left in his face but the animal panic of a cornered man, I felt the last of that habit break.

There was no verdict in him for me anymore.

There was just a man, an ordinary and frightened and cruel man, who had never been the authority on who I was and had only ever persuaded me that he was.

I did not feel triumphant.