There is nothing that so thoroughly diminishes a man who has built his cruelty on the assumption that he still matters to you than to discover that he does not, that the machine grinding him down is not powered by your feelings about him but by the impersonal fact of the law.

Marcus wanted to be my great villain, the man I could not stop thinking about, even in hatred.

And I handed him something far worse than hatred, which was irrelevance.

He was not my nemesis.

He was a compliance matter.

That was the cruelest and truest thing I could have said, and it was cruel precisely because it was not meant to be.

Chapter 12 — Run