“So you would agree, Dr. Hayes, that you are a man with the skill and the motive to shape an account.”

“I would agree I have the skill,” I said. “Dr. Mercer was present for the entire conversation and can tell the jury what I actually did with it.”

Tolliver smiled slightly and moved on, which is what a good lawyer does when you have handed him nothing.

And then, at about the fifty-minute mark, he did the thing he had been walking toward the entire time.

“Dr. Hayes, in the two years of your daughter’s marriage, did she ever come to you with a concern about her husband?”

The room went a particular kind of quiet. Reyes had told me it was coming. Emily was in the second row behind me in a gray sweater and I did not look at her, because we had agreed I wouldn’t.