My sister Nadine unwittingly taught me this nifty trick.
She and I were embroiled in a weeks-long argument about how, by virtue of my not liking her and not wanting her in my life, I was aggrieving her terribly. Her argumentation style is to make a list of grievances on a legal pad that she keeps by the phone. This is not hyperbole. I've seen the pad. When a conversation begins, she is prepared to dominate it, not letting her victim get a word in edgewise. Among other effects, this makes people not want her in their lives.
One day she left me a dozen or so hysterically angry voice messages, and I finally stopped listening to them. I deleted them instead. And then a miracle happened: they stopped coming.
I had blundered into a win-win scenario. Nadine got what she wanted: the last word. She got to define the narrative forever. I'm sure I came off well in that narrative. And me, I got what I most wanted: her absence. To me, that was the crown jewel. Letting her declare victory and spin whatever mythology shut her the fuck up was a small price to pay.
I routinely give people the last word now. Whenever I have a falling out with a friend, girlfriend, neighbor or co-worker, I just delete their emails without reading them and satisfied, they go away. You'd think they would want to extract a pound of flesh, but they don't. Or perhaps they think the email I didn't read extracted it.
So long as I don't care about what people I don't care about have to say, it costs me absolutely nothing. It's miraculous.