“Start with the oldest incident you can date.”
I looked at the blue three-ring binder on the table.
“Do you want everything?”
“Everything you can place on a date.”
“Even if I cannot prove what happened?”
“Write what you remember happened. Mark what you have evidence for.”
She slid a sheet toward me.
“Do not fill in missing pieces.”
I picked up the pen.
“The first thing I can date is the room
search.”
“Three weeks before the assault?”
“Yes.”
“What happened before that?”
I stopped writing.
“Aaron searched my room. I complained to my father.”
“What did Douglas say?”
“That Aaron was looking for money.”
Elena wrote that down.
“Whose money?”
“I do not know.”
“Then leave that part out.”
I crossed out the sentence.
Elena waited.
I wrote the date again.
“I installed the camera after that.”
“Why?”
I looked at the evidence bag on the nearby table.
“I did not put it there to catch him. I put it there because I stopped trusting my own memory.”
Elena nodded and checked the evidence log.
“Write that sentence if it matters to why you installed it.”
“It does.”
She pushed another sheet toward me.
“What else?”
I listed the dates I could remember. A missing envelope. A search through a drawer. A disagreement over money. One afternoon when my bedroom door
had been damaged before, though I could not establish who caused it.
Elena stopped me there.
“Can you prove that date?”
“No.”
“Then put a question mark beside it.”
I did.
By three thirty, the blue binder had become heavier with paper. Ruth was waiting beside my Buick, a legal pad balanced on her knee.
She glanced at the cracked passenger-side mirror.
“Still holding?”
“For now.”
She smiled.
“That mirror has survived more than most furniture.”
I opened the binder.
“I have dates.”
“Good.”
“I also have what Elaine remembers.”
Ruth looked at me.
“Did she put it in writing?”
“Not yet.”
“Then keep it separate from your own account.”
I handed her the first page.
