That is how long it took.

I have spent sixteen years listening to witnesses do exactly that in depositions, and thinking, privately, behind a machine, that is not what you said on page forty-one.

Nobody corrected me in that bay.

Dr.

Adeyemi wrote it down.

A nurse wrote it down.

And Perla looked at the floor and did not answer, which at the time I read as guilt and which I now believe was something else entirely, and I will get to it in Part Twenty.

Part Five: The Whisper