The judge ruled on the strength of three things: the hospital’s injury records, the police report the neighbor had filed, and the screenshot of Ian’s accidental confession.

The order barred Ian from contacting me and required him to stay five hundred feet away.

It also cleared the way for what came next — because everything I was about to do, I was going to do inside the letter of the law, documented and witnessed at every step.

That was the point.

A woman they had dismissed as hysterical was going to beat them with paperwork so clean it would gleam.

Chapter 14 — The Extraction