Because I understood something that the version of me from five years earlier would not have: that in a fight like this, restraint is not weakness — it is the sharpest weapon there is.

Ian and Regan’s whole method was excess.

They grabbed.

They took what wasn’t theirs and dared anyone to stop them.

If I answered their theft with theft of my own, I became a woman they could point at, a wife who had cleaned out the apartment in a rage, and the story would blur into a messy divorce where both sides behaved badly.

But if I took only and exactly what was mine, documented to the receipt, filmed room by room — then there was no blur.