“Remy!” Vera’s voice sounds so incredibly far away and all I can hear is my pounding heart.

Finally, Detective Ward steps away for a few minutes before returning to the room. Her expression is carefully neutral.

“We need to talk about last night.”

My eyes remain on the door. Still open, it provides a limited view of the hall. It’s not a particularly busy station and I glimpse only a couple people walking by. I wonder where Elise is. I have a feeling: She’s here, I know it.

“Remy’s answered your questions about last night already. Twice,” Vera says as Detective Ward checks the camera again.

“I have an update. We have a warrant for your phone and took a look at your call and text history. I just want to make sure everything lines up,” she says, sitting down to the same notepad the police officer had.

Vera yanks it from her and begins to skim. “We need time to go over this; we’ve never seen this.”

Detective Ward considers it and reluctantly says, “Fine. Fifteen minutes.” When Vera looks like she’s going to balk, Ward adds, “It’s only the last few I want to talk about,” and Vera finally acquiesces.

After Ward leaves, I look over Vera’s shoulder as she reads it, then answer her questions about which number belongs to Jack and Elise. I don’t have them memorized, but I can recognize Elise’s by her Tennessee area code and Jack’s by the frequency of our texts.

“Oh,” Vera says like she’s realized something awful just as Detective Ward knocks on the door and sits down across from us. I look up at Vera, desperate to know what she’s found.

“We’ve confirmed these texts and calls against what’s on the victim’s cell phone found at the scene,” Ward says. “His cousin helpfully provided the passcode, so we took a look there and of course we’ll confirm with the phone records once we get them, but we don’t expect to see any surprises. So here we have you calling him at 11:02 p.m.. Then at 11:18 p.m., he sends you a text saying he’s there. And then, fourteen minutes later, at 11:32 p.m. precisely, you call 9-1-1. You say that you let him in, then said goodbye, that he startled Elise, causing her to shoot him, but fourteen minutes is an awful lot of time for something you’d expect to happen quickly.”

I pull the handwritten notes toward me, confused, panic rising. It takes me a moment to find the information she’s referencing. Vera, on the other hand, dives right in.

“This means nothing,” she says.

“I think it’s suggestive,” Ward counters.

“Yeah, suggestive of nothing,” Vera says. “Fourteen minutes isn’t a lot of time. Say he texts her from the driveway and she doesn’t see it right away, there’s two minutes. Then, like Remy said, they talk for a bit, easily six or seven minutes there. And then finally she’s at her car and hears the shots, running back inside. And a few minutes with the body, in shock. Fourteen minutes is nothing.”