everything that is yours

First dig two graves.

I promised that she would be sorry, and I'm a man who keeps his promises. But I had no interest in making her sweat every day until I finally brought her to ruin, when I could just as easily strike without warning. I had no interest in lording it over her at all--it was better that she suffer and know nothing of the reasons for it.

No doubt she never gave me a thought for those years in the interim, as she established herself in the world. She didn't know that I was watching. She didn't know that every time something good happened to her, I had put into place a way to take it away from her. And she didn't know, when the world started slipping from her fingers, why it was happening.

I started with little things. Things that, if they happened on their own, would be just a minor annoyance, but when they happen in succession, made her suspect that the world was out to get her--and she was almost right, of course. The subsequent paranoia and bad moods only amplified what happened next, as I stole her job from under her, made her friends hate her and her family abandon her, even forced her lover to move across the country, away from her.

But she was clever, and she had fallback plans--but they were gone when she went to fall back on them. And when she finally hit rock bottom she still had no idea that it was my hand the whole time guiding these events. It is a comfort to know that you suffer for someone's revenge--but to think that everything has gone wrong utterly without sense or reason is to know despair.