She was convicted at trial the following spring and sentenced to a term that will keep her in custody into her seventies.

The moment Maya remembered from that trial was not the verdict.

It was the second day, when Danae Whitlock’s mother testified — about the phone calls, about the county line, about the three weeks — and Adriana Vance sat at the defense table and looked bored.

Mark Sterling’s case was the one that took the longest, because it was the one with the most in it.

He was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, financial identity theft, forgery, and — nine months later, when the mechanical review had been corroborated by two independent examiners and a former colleague had come forward about a conversation in a parking lot six days before the crash — with the murder of Danae Whitlock.