" In that moment, playing God, I had finally decided that there was no more room for forgiveness, that this was the last of her nine lives.
The perverse thing was, she would have been proud of me. Finally standing up for yourself. I could imagine the bemusement in her voice. Didn’t think you had it in you. My mother, too. Violence was something she could respect. Letting Stella drown: I thought that it would cleave me from the past, distance me from the person I had been before. But sometimes I feared that it had only brought me closer to my dark, twisted roots. "

― Anna Pitoniak , Necessary People