It documents that the patient, awake post-operatively, stated spontaneously that she had been hurt “after lunch,” that she had been “on the couch a long time,” and that “the shop lights came on.”

And then it does the thing that made everything else possible, which is that it does not interpret any of it.

It does not say the mother lied.

It does not speculate.

It records what a nine-year-old said, in quotation marks, with a time on it, four hours before anybody in the world knew there was going to be a case.

That note is why nobody was ever able to argue that my daughter’s account was constructed by her father, because her father was in California when it was taken.