It is the difference between a person who did a terrible thing and a person who is dangerous, between an incident and a character.

I could have found room, perhaps, to pity a woman who had snapped.

But there is no snapping in a velvet box carried down a hallway at a carefully chosen hour.

There is only intention, cold and sustained, and intention is the thing the law rightly cares about most, and the thing I have learned to watch for most closely in the people I let near my life.

And what the footage showed me, past any doubt, was that I was not looking at a temper.