Nine Weeks

Nine weeks after the permanent order, Drake's attorney filed a motion to modify.

The grounds were reasonable-sounding: changed circumstances, claim that the order was based on incomplete information, request for a review hearing. Aaron explained it to her in his office with the calm precision she was starting to recognize as his way of managing fear.

"He's testing it," Aaron said. "Trying to establish that you're the one who's escalating — that you're the one who's using the legal system to harass him."

"Using it how?"

"The PI. The evidence gathering. If he can show the court that you're investigating him, that you're the one initiating contact through third parties —"

"The PI is legal. I'm allowed to hire someone to document his behavior."

"You are. But he'll frame it as surveillance. He'll say you've been tracking him, that you're the one who's been— " He stopped. "Liza, this is what he does. He's done it before. I need you to understand that."

She understood. She'd been through this — or something like this — three times before the fourteenth order, before she stopped coming back.

"What's the timeline?"

"We have thirty days to respond. The hearing will be in six weeks."

Six weeks. She'd survived worse. She went home and updated her evidence log — the text message, the anonymous letter, the tracking data from the PI — and she filed everything in the folder Aaron had given her and she thought about the woman who'd lived in this apartment eight months ago, the one who'd come here with nothing and thought: at least it's quiet here.

It wasn't quiet. But it was hers, and she was still here, and the restraining order was still in effect, and the contempt motion was still moving through the court.

She called Myrna. They talked for forty minutes about nothing in particular — Myrna's daughter's soccer season, a recipe Myrna wanted to try, the weather next week — and when she hung up she felt the specific relief of having had a conversation that didn't involve lawyers, evidence, or the legal status of her own life.

She made dinner. She ate it at the table. She went to bed at a reasonable hour.

The next morning she found an envelope in her mailbox with no return address.

Inside: a photograph of her apartment building, taken from across the street. On the back, handwritten: still watching.