I made it between the eleventh and the fifteenth, out of terror, and I made it because I needed the injury to have started before nine forty-three, and I had it for four months and I gave it to two agencies and I would have sworn to it.

I am a court reporter.

My entire professional existence is built on the proposition that what people remember is unreliable and that only the record is worth anything.

I have said that at dinner parties.

I have said it to law students.

I have been smug about it for sixteen years.

And I did it anyway, inside four days, about the most important morning of my life, with a contemporaneous note sitting on my own phone.

I called Rosalind Vey the next morning and told her and she said one word, which was “Right,” and then she said: “We disclose it.