The interior camera over the register is a better picture than the forecourt. She goes to the cooler. She takes a bottle of water. She stands in line behind one other customer for forty seconds, and she is white in the face, and her left hand is closed at her side, and she does not look at the door once.

She pays cash.

And then, as the clerk hands her the receipt, my daughter lifts her chin and looks directly up into the camera above the register.

Two full seconds. Then she folds the receipt, and puts it in her coat pocket, and walks out.

Reyes stopped the tape there and let it sit on the screen for a long moment before she said anything, and I have never in my life been more grateful to a person for their sense of timing.

“She’s putting herself on the record,” Reyes said to the jury. “Time. Place. Both of them in frame. A cash receipt with a register number on it. And a piece of his shirt in her hand, which she kept for ninety-two minutes, through everything that happened afterward, and which was in her coat pocket when she was carried into St. Mary’s.
“The defense has told you Emily Miller is confused, unstable, and unreliable. At 10:27 on the night in question, she was the most reliable person in this case.”