He had shoved his mother into a wall and, in the same breath, begun narrating a version in which I had simply stumbled backward on my own, a confused old woman losing her footing.

Gregory Walsh understood what he was watching.

I saw it in his face.

So did the judge.

A man does not construct an alibi in the same second as an accident.

He constructs it because he knows there was no accident.

I had seen that exact reflex before, in my working life, in the recorded statements of people who had staged accidents for insurance money, and it always gave them away in the end, because innocence and guilt narrate themselves differently.

An innocent person, in the shock of a genuine accident, does not immediately begin explaining.