I get asked this question more than any other about the book, usually by readers who already have an answer and want to know if I agree with it. I don’t, not fully, in either direction, and the book was my attempt to explain why.
Kurt Jensen, the man responsible for the accident that opens the novel, was one of the hardest characters I’ve ever had to write, because I refused to make him simple. It would have been easier, structurally, to give him no interior life at all — a driver, a mistake, a name in a police report. Instead there’s a full chapter from his point of view before the accident happens: an ordinary, irritable morning, a dispatcher’s brief look that’s too short to be a reproach and too long to be indifference, traffic lights and cars and faces sliding past him too slowly. He’s not a monster in that chapter. He’s a man having a bad day who makes catastrophic choices anyway. I wanted readers to sit with that discomfort early, before they knew what those choices would cost, because it complicates everything that follows. It’s much harder to cheer for someone’s punishment once you’ve spent a chapter inside the ordinary tedium of their morning.
The trial doesn’t resolve that discomfort. If anything, it sharpens it. My protagonist sits in that courtroom as a witness, watching a process that’s supposed to deliver something like closure, and finding instead a verdict that feels disproportionate to what he lost — not because the court failed procedurally, but because no court can actually weigh a life against a sentence in any way that feels like an even trade. That gap, between what the law can offer and what a person actually needs to feel like the scales have balanced, is where the entire second half of the book lives.
I don’t think revenge is justice, if we’re using justice to mean something proportionate, impartial, and bound by rules everyone agreed to in advance. Revenge is none of those things. It’s personal by definition, and it answers to nobody but the person carrying it out. But I also don’t think the legal system’s version of justice is beyond question just because it’s official. Sentencing guidelines, statutes of limitations, the practical limits of what a court can actually prove — all of it can produce outcomes that are lawful and still feel wildly insufficient to the person standing closest to the loss. The book doesn’t resolve that tension because I don’t think it can be resolved. I think it can only be examined honestly, from as many angles as the story allows, which is part of why Kurt gets his own chapter, and the detective gets his, and my protagonist doesn’t get the last word on any of it simply because he’s the one narrating most of the book.
What I wanted to avoid, more than anything, was writing a revenge story that functions as wish fulfillment — the kind where the reader is meant to feel satisfied when the score is settled. There’s no satisfaction built into this book’s ending, and that was deliberate. My protagonist doesn’t get his family back. He doesn’t even fully get himself back. Whatever he gains by the end, it costs him something that doesn’t have a name, and I wanted the price to be visible on the page rather than glossed over in service of a tidy conclusion.
If there’s an answer the book leans toward, it’s an uncomfortable one: that revenge can feel like justice to the person pursuing it, and can look nothing like justice to everyone standing outside that grief, and both of those things can be true about the same act at the same moment. I didn’t write this book to settle that argument. I wrote it to make readers feel the weight of both sides at once, long enough that neither position stays comfortable.
If a reader finishes the book more certain than when they started, I’ve probably failed at what I was trying to do. The point was never certainty. It was to make the uncertainty specific, so it’s harder to dismiss as an abstract dinner-party debate once you’ve spent three hundred pages inside the particulars of one man’s version of it.
I think the honest position, the one I actually hold, is that the word “justice” is doing more work than it can bear in most conversations about revenge. It implies a kind of balance — a scale that tips back to level once the right weight is added. Grief doesn’t behave like that. Nothing added to one side of that scale brings it back to level, because what was taken was never the kind of thing a scale can measure in the first place. Revenge doesn’t restore what was lost. It can’t. What it sometimes offers instead is a different kind of ending, one where the person carrying the loss finally gets to stop simply absorbing what happened to them and start acting on it. Whether that’s worth what it costs is exactly the question the book refuses to answer for the reader.
