I said, “You’re joking.”

“I am absolutely not joking and I hate it, and I want you to understand that I have to say it and that you do not have to do it, and that if you say no I will help you go somewhere tonight and I will not think less of you for one second.”

He put the pen down.

“But if you leave today, we get nothing, and in eleven months a jury hears about a woman who ran, and a man who was confused about it.

If you go home and behave exactly as you did last Tuesday, then in two or three weeks I have a case that ends this permanently.