Whatever had bound Richard Cole and Marcus Vance together in their private dealings had come apart, and it had come apart in a room with a knife in it.

At twenty-two minutes past nine, as Vance reached across his desk toward the telephone, the recording captured the moment everything turned, and the watchers in the warden’s office looked away, or down, or simply endured it, because a violent death is a terrible thing to witness even at five years’ remove through the eye of a hidden camera.

The narrator of these events will not lay out the particulars of what the knife did, because the particulars are not the point and no one is served by them.

What matters is what the footage proved beyond any argument: that Marcus Vance died that night at the hands of Richard Cole, and that Elena Cole was nowhere in that room, and had never been.