“He touched my daughter.”
“Then let him be arrested for it,” I said. “You get one chance to do this in the right order. If you take it out of order there’s nothing left.”
He stood there breathing for a long time.
Then he put the keys on the hall table.
We called Detective Reyes on Monday morning. All three of us went. It took five hours, and Ava did four of them, and Daniel sat in a hallway for two of those because they don’t let a parent sit in on all of it.
I gave them the spiral notebook. Forty-one pages by then, dated in ink, written the same day every time. Reyes turned it over in her hands for a moment before she read any of it and asked me what I did for work, and when I told her she said, “That explains the margins.”
She also told me, later and more gently, that if I had written it up all at once in June it would have been worth almost nothing.
The old phone went out for a forensic download. It came back with two hundred and eleven messages Ava had deleted, which is the whole reason I had told her to power it off and not touch it — deleted isn’t gone, it’s just quiet, and a wiped phone is a wiped case.
