The Court House

The restraining order was granted at nine forty-seven in the morning.

Liza sat in the hallway afterward with the paper still warm from the judge's signature and tried to feel something. Anything. Relief would have been appropriate. The hollow, ringing calm that had carried her through the hearing was still there — she could hold it, turn it over, examine it — but she couldn't feel past it.

Gavin found her on the bench near the vending machine. He sat down without asking if she was all right, which was one of the reasons she'd asked him to come.

"How'd it go?" he said.

"They granted it."

"Good." He was quiet for a moment. "Do you want to go somewhere?"

"Where?"

"Somewhere that's not a hallway with a restraining order on it."

She almost laughed. Almost.

At home — her apartment, the one she'd been in for eight months, the one Drake still didn't know the address of — she put the order in the kitchen drawer next to the first one. The second one. The fourth. She had a drawer full of pieces of paper that said he wasn't allowed to call, come, write, or show up anywhere near her, and she looked at them and thought about the fourteenth one, the one she'd filed and withdrawn, and how she'd sat in this same apartment and folded it into quarters and put it away like a receipt.

She was not doing that again.

Her phone buzzed. Aaron, her attorney: Judge set the full hearing for March 4. 45 days. Get your evidence folder ready.

Forty-five days.

She put the phone down and looked at the drawer and thought: This one holds.