The fantasy is that you heal by winning, by making them hurt, by standing over their ruin.

The reality is that you heal by forgetting, by building a life so absorbing and so complete that the person who hurt you fades, without ceremony, from the center of your attention to its farthest edge and then out of the frame entirely, until one day you realize you have gone weeks without a single thought of them.

The court judgment did not heal me.

It only formalized, in the language of the law, a healing that had happened long before, quietly, in a life full of fireflies and cookies and a kind man on his knees for our daughter.