I did the fourth item at seven that morning, sitting on the floor of a hotel bathroom with the laptop on the closed toilet lid, and it took two hours and ran to nine pages.

I recommend it to anybody in any version of this situation, and not for the legal reason.

The legal reason is real — a contemporaneous account written within twenty-four hours is worth about four times what a statement given eleven months later is worth, and Naomi later told me that document did more work in the family case than anything except the video.

But that is not why I recommend it.

I recommend it because at four o’clock the previous afternoon I had been a woman with a job and a marriage and a slightly difficult living situation, and by seven the next morning I was somebody I did not recognize, and writing down what had happened in the order it happened was the only thing that stopped me from spending that day disassembling.

Nine pages.