"No. It's not--" He shook his head intently before looking at her. "Do you know why I let you go? Why, after our fight, I decided to let you go? It's because I knew, that if I killed you, that you'd come back. You would come back, you'd be mad, and you'd tell everyone. It would've been a problem. But, if I thought I could have got away with it, I wouldn't have thought twice about it." His eyes shifted to the ground with a hard glare. "That's the way I thought. It's why I beat you, because I didn't care how much I hurt you. That was the kind of person I had become."

He realized how awful that sounded. It was important that it did. He wanted her to realize how awful it was. To be mad. Mad at him like he was mad at himself. But he wasn't done. "I don't ever want to think like that again. I don't ever want to be so cold that I don't care about the lives of others."