It's a shock that no one could ever anticipate: when your heart goes from beating so fast that it's vibrating with intensity to suddenly barely beating at all.

After she had fired the gun she had been holding her breath with fear and anticipation, but now she was gasping desperately for air and for life. No longer able to hold herself upright, her body involuntarily slid down the wall. She fell to the floor of the projection room in her beloved theatre, Le Gamaar. The theatre that Marcel would burn to the ground that night. It wouldn't be long now. The final reel played on in the auditorium below, rampant gunshots onscreen masking the sounds of the double murder that had occurred above.

She had always known she would die that night, being locked into the theatre with the rest of them. Yet she had assumed she would have lived just long enough to see the fulfillment of her final triumph: vengeance, not just her own, but vengeance of the entire Jewish race for the atrocities committed by the Nazis. She would have been consumed by the flames, but she would also have taken down as many Germans as she could have along with her—a worthy legacy for the Dreyfus family, perpetrated by the only surviving member.

Shosanna Dreyfus stared at the ceiling, not wanting to look at the man next to her on the floor. The man that she had shot, and that had killed her in return. After all, he too would have died that night, but it shouldn't have been like this. Not in this forgotten corner of the theatre, alone in the dark, his white uniform now soaked with blood. Yet Shosanna regretted his murder less than the action she had taken immediately afterwards. Why had she kneeled down to him? What moment of tenderness for the German soldier could possibly have overcame her purpose at that moment? Shosanna cursed herself. She told herself that she deserved this death. This was the fate a Nazi sympathizer deserved, and that is what she had been during that moment after she had shot Fredrick. She deserved to die in tremendous pain, for being stupid enough to see past his uniform and to see the man dying on the floor. It was only a second of stupidity, a fleeting moment of irrationality, but that was all it took for Fredrick to strain his shaking finger against the trigger. She steeled her frayed nerves and forced herself not to think about him. She stared at the ceiling instead, tracing the outline of every crack with her eyes, holding onto the physical world for just a little while longer.

She almost smiled as she gasped again, her chest exploding with pain each time her lungs strained to expand. She almost smiled because she knew what no one in that audience could know—she had already put on the fourth reel. Shosanna did not need to be alive to make sure that the war would end that night. Her appearance in her little film would give her a brief life after death. Marcel would get to see her one last time, and know that she had not died in vain. She wished a happy life for her beloved, and hoped he had forgiven her for leaving him to live on alone.

Her heart was weakly tapping rather than beating now. She tried to hold on a little longer, and realized that living no longer mattered. For that moment that she had assumed would not come for decades had arrived early, and brought with it a reason to be grateful. She would be with her family soon. The daughter would rejoin her mother, her father, her brother, and the rest of those who were taken from her too soon. She would be able to tell them how she finally had brought their murderers to justice.

Shosanna was ready. She let go.