I know that on the fourth of September at 11:52 in the morning — twelve minutes after Bennie Arceneaux declined to notarise a pre-signed form — Patricia telephoned Oscar and they spoke for nineteen minutes.

And I know that on the twelfth of September at 17:53:41 she called him and they spoke for six minutes and eleven seconds, which begins three minutes and twenty-eight seconds after our daughter’s head hit a table.

What I do not have is one word of the two hundred and six text messages.

They are gone.

Deleted from her phone at 11:41 on the sixteenth and deleted from his at 11:58, seventeen minutes later, which is the single most damaging inference in the file and which the State was never able to put a specific message behind.

Detective Shanahan said to me, in the October, in a room with a water cooler in it: