It was Braddock’s whole philosophy, the thing that let him poison a stranger and stalk a little girl and call it justice.
But it was also, in a smaller and more domestic key, Mireille’s — the belief that her son’s love was a thing she owned, that I had stolen it, that a debt was owed to her for the life she’d spent raising him and that she was entitled to collect it by any means.
And it was the thing my dying mother had been most afraid of, and had begged me in her letter to refuse: do not let it turn you into someone bitter. Three people in this story had believed, in their different ways, that the past gives you a license to harm the present.
Standing in that warehouse with a wire against my collarbone, I decided, completely, that I was not going to be the fourth.
Braddock wanted me to inherit his logic.
I refused it.