“You kept eleven months of tape for seven years,” Nandakumar said.

“I kept it in a safe deposit box that my sister pays for,” Vanessa said. “In her name.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not stupid,” she said. “Everyone in this story has been extremely certain I’m stupid and I would like the record to reflect that I’m the only person in this room who has been paying rent on insurance for seven years.”

There are conversations on those tapes that are not Daniel talking to Vanessa. There is a voice that is not American and a set of instructions that Daniel Thorne did not have the imagination to invent, and there is a date in 2018, three months before the gala, which is four months before anyone breached a hospital CCTV system.

Daniel was a middleman. The text on my phone in 2019 had told me so, in plain English, and I had spent seven years treating it as a taunt instead of as information.