Employees should not lose their livelihoods because their bosses are criminals.

That, to me, was the only part of the whole affair that felt like a victory: not that Marcus fell, but that eighty people who had done nothing wrong did not fall with him.

I have thought a great deal about the distinction the young developer named for me later, when she said I had understood the difference between the people who built the shell companies and the people who built the product, because it turned out to be the moral center of the entire story, the thing that separated what I did from mere revenge.

It would have been so easy, and so lucrative, to treat Marcus’s whole company as a single contaminated thing, to let it all burn, to walk away with the write-off and call it justice.