That is what I wanted, in the end — not for Nathan and Eleanor and Charles to be in pain, but for them to be stopped, permanently, by a system larger than my own anger, so that I would never again have to carry the weight of stopping them myself.

When the sentences were read, I did not feel the hole in me fill, because that was never what a courtroom could do.

What I felt instead was lighter — the specific relief of setting down a thing you have carried alone for years and handing it, at last, to people whose job it is to hold it.

Not victory.

Just the end of having to be my own police, my own court, my own last line of defense.

I got to be, for the first time in three years, simply a person the law protected, instead of a woman protecting herself in the dark.