And I have made my peace with that, because I think there is a difference — a real and important difference — between cruelty and justice that merely happens to be satisfying.

Cruelty is inflicting suffering on someone in order to feel the suffering.

Justice is the restoration of a true order, in which people finally reap what they have sown, and if that restoration happens to feel good, the goodness of the feeling does not make it cruelty.

I did not invent Julian’s suffering.

I did not fabricate his crimes or exaggerate his cruelty or manufacture his downfall.

Every single thing that happened to him on that sidewalk, he had built, with his own hands, out of five years of his own choices.