The cream-colored envelope sat on my desk for three days. Inside, an invitation to a reunion for the people who tried to ruin me. Fifteen years had passed, but those words still tasted like bleach.

I had been staring at the envelope for a long time before I opened it. My consulting firm hummed quietly outside my office door, phones ringing, deals closing, the life I had built one careful brick at a time. The return address pulled 15 years of dust off a wound I thought I had closed.