And standing there, watching my daughter let the light go free, I understood something I had spent years getting wrong.

For a long time, I had thought that revenge meant making Marcus feel the same pain he had given me, that justice would arrive as his suffering, that I would know I had won when I saw him hurt.

I had been wrong about all of it.

Revenge, real revenge, the only kind that ever actually frees you, was not his pain at all.

It was this.