Because triumph over Marcus would have meant Marcus still mattered, would have meant I had spent the intervening years keeping a scoreboard, tracking his fall against my rise, measuring my life by the distance it had traveled from his.

And I had not done that.

Somewhere in those years, without deciding to, I had simply stopped thinking about him, and the stopping was so complete that when the final court judgment landed on my desk, I felt not the thrill of a settled score but the mild, procedural closing of a file that had long ago ceased to be about a person and become merely a matter to be concluded.

That, I have come to believe, is what real recovery from a great betrayal actually looks like, and it is nothing like the fantasy.