That is the image she carried into a hospital and then into a phone call at 2:17 in the morning and then into about two hundred hours of therapy, and it is real, and it happened, and there is a video of it.

But the video is sixteen seconds long, and the curtain closes at nine.

At second thirteen — four seconds later — a shape crosses the stair landing window one floor down, moving fast.

At second fifteen and a half, right at the edge of the frame, the front door of the main house opens.

Simone was already coming down.

She closed that curtain and turned and ran, and she was out of the house in under seven seconds, and my daughter did not see any of that because she was on the ground looking up at a window.

I want to describe what those four seconds did to me, because it is the single most complicated thing in this account and I got it wrong for about three months.