Six weeks out, her back was healing the way that kind of injury heals — slowly, and never all the way.

She had two more surgeries ahead of her that were about appearance and not about function, and she was not sure she wanted them, and I had learned to say *whatever you decide* and then close my mouth.

The state had charged Daniel with attempted murder, aggravated assault, and two other counts I could recite in my sleep. Trial was set for October.

The prosecutor was a woman named Marisol Reyes who had been doing this eleven years and told us plainly, on the first meeting, that she liked our case and that liking a case is not the same as winning one.

So the machinery was moving. That should have been enough. It wasn’t, because of one word.

I had built a timeline on my kitchen table. That is what I do. I built it out of index cards, the way I built differential diagnoses for thirty years, and I laid it out left to right across the table where Emily used to do her homework, and I moved cards around at night when the house got too quiet.