What happened: she drove to the one person she was certain would take her daughter to a hospital without asking her permission first, and then she left, because she could not be there when it happened.

The mall was not an alibi.

I have the receipts now — they are in the file — and they show a coffee at 10:52 and nothing else for two hours.

They did not shop.

They sat.

Curtis had said, at about nine o’clock: “Let’s just get out of the house.”

And Perla said yes, because she could not sit in her own kitchen waiting for a telephone to ring.

She said it to me in that room, and she said it flatly, and it is the only time she has ever said anything about that day that did not sound like it had been through a lawyer.