" Whatever you did, and whoever you killed, and however you feel about it, you have to judge all of that in context. You were doing what you felt you had to do, and you were doing it for love.”
“The people I killed are just as dead.”
“Yes. It makes no difference to them why you did it. But it makes a difference to me and to you. What we’ve been through in the last couple of years has produced the relationship we have now, achieved love, maybe. Something we’ve earned, something we’ve paid for in effort and pain and maybe mistakes as well. I live with some.”
“I know,” I said.
“We aren’t who we were,” she said. "

― Robert B. Parker , Taming a Sea-Horse (Spenser, #13)