Part Twenty-Five: Twenty Minutes

It was not twenty minutes.

It was twenty-three minutes and forty-one seconds between the moment my daughter’s head struck that table and the moment my key went into the front door.

I have it to the second because a thirty-one-dollar camera timestamps everything, and because I have worked it out perhaps a hundred times, and because it is the only number in this entire account that I knew before I knew anything else.

Twenty-three minutes and forty-one seconds.