Chapter 17
Chapter 18: The Paper Ghost
A few weeks after the village opened, a final, necessary piece of administrative cleanup arrived on my desk.
My attorney forwarded a document to my email. It was the formal notification that the State of Illinois had processed the permanent, lifetime extension of the restraining order against Trent Vance, taking effect immediately upon the hypothetical end of his sentence.
I printed the document out.
I laid it on the glass surface of my desk. I picked up a black fountain pen, uncapped it, and signed my name on the bottom line. Olivia Miller. (I had legally dropped his surname the moment the divorce was finalized).
I slid the paper into a folder and handed it to my assistant to be filed in the archives.
That was it. That was the totality of Trent Vance’s existence in my world. He was no longer a threat. He was no longer a monster hiding under the bed. He was just a single piece of bureaucratic paperwork, buried in a filing cabinet, entirely forgotten.
I walked over to the window of my office, looking down at the bustling streets of Chicago.
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I had spent my twenties running from a ghost. I had spent my thirties building a fortress to keep the ghost out.
Now, as I entered my forties, I realized the ghost had simply ceased to exist.
