But I had spent twenty years around investigations of one kind or another, and I knew the one thing that a wronged person almost never believes until they have watched it happen: that an accusation carried on a wave of emotion is far weaker than a fact set down quietly and left to sit.

The moment I editorialized, I would have handed them a way to file me as the bitter wife, the jealous spouse, a source to be discounted.

So I gave them a photograph with a timestamp and a medical record with a gap in it, and I let those two documents say, in their flat institutional voice, the thing I was burning to shout.

They said it far better than I could have.