The Holding Period

Six months after closing her first impossible file, records specialist Iris Halloway opens a second one - and finds a pattern stranger than the one that nearly got her killed. No annual renewals this time. Just fourteen small, perfectly legal transactions, spaced across fifty-one years, each one resetting a dead woman's account the moment before it could finally, permanently close.

Agnes Whitcombe died in 1974. Someone has spent half a century making sure the state's paperwork never quite believed it.

Iris and her partner Desmond have five weeks before a new statute force-finalizes every account like this one - sealing the record forever, whether it's true or not. What they find is a caseworker who has been quietly filing corrections he had no authority to make, a Vital Statistics analyst who was overruled twenty years ago for asking the right question, and a woman four states away who has spent her whole life being denied things nobody would explain - with no idea the government has been certain, for fifty-one years, that she doesn't exist.

But the file is starting to fight back against everyone who tries to close it wrong - and the deadline that started as five weeks is closing faster than anyone filing the paperwork can keep up with.

A documentary horror novel about the records that quietly decide who we are, and the people who spend their whole lives making sure the wrong version never gets to be the last word.

The conclusion to The Escheatment Cycle duology.