There was no one else in the room. The absence of lawyers and intermediaries was something Richard had specifically requested, and Maya had respected the request because she understood that he was trying to say something that could only be said without an audience, and she was willing to give him the space to say it. Richard said that he had spent eight months trying to understand what had happened and what he should have done differently, not only that evening, but in the years before it, in the habits of thought and the patterns of assumption that had made it possible for his wife to act the way she had, and for him to briefly defend her. He said that he wished they had met under different circumstances. He said it plainly without performance.
It was the most honest thing Maya had heard from him. Maya looked at him for a moment. Then she said, "We did meet correctly. Your family simply showed me the truth. She said it without malice and without satisfaction."
She said it the way a person states something they have thought about carefully and arrived at honestly. Richard nodded. He did not argue with it. They sat quietly for a moment in the way that people sometimes sit when everything that needed to be said has been said and the remaining time is simply acknowledgment. Then Maya stood.
She extended her hand. He shook it. She collected her folio from the table and walked out of the room, through the corridor, and into the elevator, and out of the building into the September afternoon light, where the city moved around her in its ordinary way, indifferent, and continuous, and full of the next thing. She did not celebrate what had happened to the Whitmore family. She took no particular satisfaction in their reduced circumstances because the goal had never been to reduce them.
The goal had been to protect something she had built over 20 years from the corrosive influence of people who did not understand that power was not the same as character, that money was not the same as integrity, that the confidence to slap a stranger in a ballroom full of witnesses was not strength but its precise opposite. She had seen enough of the world to know that institutions built on contempt eventually collapsed under their own weight. She had not needed to collapse the Witors. She had only needed to step back and allow the structure they had built to bear what it could not bear. The slap had lasted one second.