It was thin and it did not hold, mostly because eleven other people testified to the opposite and because the prosecutor had a photograph of Margaret and Nathan laughing together at Sophie’s fifth birthday party.

The second was that the debts were ordinary business obligations and that the insurance was ordinary estate planning.

The third was that anyone with access to a household computer could have performed the searches.

That last one collapsed under a timestamp.

Four of the searches, including the one about cremation, were performed on a laptop while it was connected to a hotel network in Phoenix, in a room registered to Nathan Brooks, on a night when Emily was at home in San Diego, which the defense had established themselves, in an unrelated filing, eight months earlier.

Margaret sat through all of it without visible reaction.