Chapter 48 - CH 47 - The Culmination

Spring arrived not with a gentle, hesitant thaw, but with a defiant, almost violent explosion of life, as if the city itself was shaking off the grim, clinging residue of a long winter and the lingering psychic stain of the Vale scandal. The annual Westbridge Creative Writing Fellowship Gala, the glittering, culminating event of the academic year, was upon them. It was held, with a sense of tradition that bordered on ritual, in the Grand Ballroom of the Rutherford Hotel, a space that, for Amelia, was now permanently haunted by the ghost of a different gala, a different emerald dress, a different, more naive version of herself.