“I liked him,” she told that courtroom.

“He was charming and he was attentive and he remembered my husband’s name after meeting him once.

I thought my daughter had done well.”

Emily was an architect.

She had gone to Cal Poly and then to a firm in Little Italy that did civic work — libraries, a transit center, two schools — and she was good at it in a way that was recognized: by thirty-two she had her name on projects, and by thirty-four she was managing them.

She had also inherited two properties when David died.