And at 11:41 that night, according to her carrier records, the text thread between Patricia Ocaña and Oscar Ramirez that had run from the nineteenth of August to the sixteenth of September was deleted from her device.

Part Eighteen: What Was Gone

You cannot delete a telephone call.

The carrier has the metadata and a subpoena gets it and there is nothing anybody can do about that.

So I know that between the nineteenth of August and the sixteenth of September 2024, my wife and her brother exchanged forty-one telephone calls and two hundred and six text messages.

I know the dates and the times and the durations and the direction of every one.