At the trial, the state prosecutors laid out the overwhelming chain of evidence, all of it, the digital climate overrides with Marcus’s user ID, the badge-access logs showing the impossible timeline, the toxicology reports, and the text messages I had photographed from Marcus’s phone in a hospital chair at four in the morning.

Facing decades in prison, Veronica entered a guilty plea, implicating both Salgado and Marcus in exchange for a structured sentence.

The perfect crime came apart, thread by documented thread, in a courtroom, exactly as it had begun to come apart in a suburban living room the moment my daughter climbed into a casket and told me she had felt two thumps.

There is a justice in that symmetry that I have never stopped being grateful for.