I understood that temptation and I refused it, deliberately and completely, not because I am a better man than most but because I had learned, long before Vanessa, that private justice is almost always worse justice.

The law is slow and imperfect and often frustrating, but it has one enormous virtue that a wronged man’s fury does not: it is accountable, and it is seen, and its outcomes can be trusted precisely because they do not belong to the person with the grievance.

I wanted Vanessa held to account by something larger and cooler than my own anger.

So I gave it to them, and I let them carry it, and that was the right thing to do.