He Tested Me With Prenup I Left Him With Regret Chapter 30
She didn’t ask if I would ever take Grant back.
And I didn’t treat her like a shadow of the man who had once been in my life.
She was just Lucy.
Before we left the restaurant, she pulled a new drawing from her backpack.
It was of the doors of the Chicago History Museum.
Inside the doorway stood her and me.
No Grant.
No Holloway house.
I accepted the drawing.
“This one’s for me, too?”
“Yes.”
She smiled a little.
“But not to make you stay.”
“I just wanted to give it to you.”
I slipped the drawing into my folder.
“Then I’ll keep it safe.”
A month before the restraining order expired, my lawyer asked if I wanted to file for an extension.
For the past two years, Grant had not sent a single letter.
He had not used Lucy to pass along messages.
He had not shown up outside my apartment or the museum again.
“Based on the current record, an extension might not be granted,” my lawyer said. “But you can still keep the no-contact notice in place.”
I nodded.
“Then I won’t apply for one.”
The lawyer looked a little surprised.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
I no longer needed a court order to remind me where my boundaries were.
As for whether Grant would respect them, the consequences of that would be his to bear.
On the day the restraining order expired, his attorney sent over a signed statement.
Grant agreed to continue complying with the prior no-contact request.
There was no note attached.
No apology.
Not a single line saying, *I’ll wait for you.*
After reading it, I filed the document away.
The box containing the forty-seven letters was still at my lawyer’s office.
She asked if she should return it to Grant.
“No.”
“Shred it.”
“You don’t want to know what he wrote?”
“No.”
The significance of those letters had never been about how much regret Grant had written into them.
It was that after I said no, he wrote forty-seven of them anyway.
Now, they had served their final purpose.
When the shredder started, the thick envelopes were fed in one by one.
No one opened them.
No one read them.
The explanations Grant had spent two years writing ended as nothing more than a bag of paper scraps that could never be put back together.
My lawyer handed me the destruction record to sign.
I wrote my name.
This time, I wasn’t signing a lease.
Or a repayment.
Or a restraining order.
This time, I was signing an ending.