The investigators had put it to him quietly. Not accusatorially not yet, not in that particular register. They had laid it out the way you laid out evidence that spoke clearly enough not to need amplification.
And Leo had sat at the table with his folded hands and his lawyer and the remnants of his professional composure and said nothing for a long time.
He remembered it.
That was the thing about it. He had told himself, in the months since, that it was not the kind of thing a person remembered clearly. The mind processed certain events differently. That there was a mercy in the blurring.
But he remembered it clearly.
He had been on the phone in the hallway. Not careful enough about the hallway, had chosen it for the privacy it usually offered, had not accounted for the particular quiet of that time of evening in that house, had not heard her coming until she was close enough to have already heard.
They believe me. It's just a matter of time.
