I turned my back to the street, faced the cameras, and cut the red ribbon, stepping forward into the bright future I had built with my own hands.

I have thought since about that nothing, because it surprised me.

I had expected, on the day I finally saw Conrad ruined, to feel something large — vindication, or triumph, or at the very least the grim satisfaction of a scale balanced.

Instead there was only a mild, clean emptiness, the feeling you get looking at a house you used to live in and finding you have no attachment to it anymore.

And I understood, standing there with the ceremonial scissors in my hand, that the nothing was the whole point — was, in fact, the truest measure of how far I had come.

Hatred would have meant he still occupied space in me.