I found I didn’t have to.

We talked for two hours that afternoon. He asked precise, unhurried questions, and he did not once look at me the way my family had learned to — like something fragile that had broken itself.

He looked at me the way you look at a competent colleague who has brought you a solid case.

He explained what was criminal and what was merely monstrous, where the state’s interest ended and a civil matter began, which pieces of the drive would matter to a prosecutor and which would matter only to me.

He was, I understood, being careful — building something that would hold, because a case this large against a woman this practiced would be attacked from every side, and he intended it to be airtight before it ever saw daylight.

Near the end he set down his pen and looked at me for a moment.