It carries real and serious felony penalties, and Arthur had brought a case built to prove every piece of it.

I made a decision, early in that process, that I have never regretted, which was that I would let the law do all of it, and that I would not, at any point, take a single piece of it into my own hands.

It would have been easy to do otherwise.

I had the means, the anger, and the standing to make Julian and Chloe’s lives difficult in a dozen informal ways, to pursue them, to punish them, to make sure everyone they knew heard exactly what they had done.

I did none of it.