Twenty minutes of delay is not terror.
Twenty minutes is calculation.
Twenty minutes is a person standing over a collapsed man, thinking, weighing options, deciding what serves her before deciding what saves him — perhaps hoping the papers might still get signed, perhaps searching the apartment for something, perhaps simply frozen by the gap between the outcome she’d planned and the one she was looking at.
I did not know which.
But I knew that a delay of that length was not the behavior of the innocent, worried woman she was performing for the corridor, and I knew that when the phone records were pulled, that twenty-minute gap would sit at the center of the case against her like a hole in the ice with her name on it.
She saw that I understood all of this.