A folded gas station receipt, time-stamped 10:27 p.m.

My daughter had been face down on her own kitchen floor, bleeding, with her lung compromised and her body shutting down, and she had spent the words she had left telling a stranger where the evidence was.

Chapter 3 — Forty-Three Days

Deputy Cole Barrett is thirty-one years old and he was, I am fairly sure, genuinely furious with me.

We sat in a conference room at the sheriff’s office — me, Alan, Claire Ashford, Barrett, and ADA Marisol Reyes, who arrived twenty minutes late with a coffee and an expression I did not care for.

Reyes let Barrett go first. He asked me, in order: when I had contacted Miss Ashford, how, what I had said, whether I had suggested any facts to her, whether I had shown her anything, whether money had been discussed.

I answered all of it. Then Reyes set her coffee down.