Letty backed up the video, freezing it at the point the stranger entered the apartment. She studied the frame, but Tanya stood between the man and the nanny camera, so tall in her high-heeled boots that she totally obscured him from view. She tried enlarging the frame, too, but only got a fuzzier image of a man—at least she thought it was a man—in a knit cap.

Whoever he was, he wasn’t a stranger to Tanya, who was clinging to his hand like a junior high school girl.

She knew she shouldn’t have been surprised that Tanya had already moved on to seeing a new man, because she couldn’t remember a time, since her younger sister reached puberty, that she didn’t have a boyfriend.

Letty tried to think back to the conversations she’d had with Tanya in the months leading up to her death. She remembered Valentine’s Day—walking into Tanya’s apartment to find a huge arrangement of pink peonies. “Secret admirer?” she’d asked, teasingly.

“No!” Tanya had exclaimed. “I’m done with men. I bought these for myself. Just because.”

Letty watched more of the nanny-cam video for two more hours, reliving the tedium of life with a preschooler. Winter in New York City meant that Maya, and by extension Ellie, didn’t leave home much.

The camera captured Tanya, seated at her kitchen table, having several heated telephone exchanges, with, Letty guessed, her lawyer.

“How much longer ’til we get all this settled?” Tanya raged. “I don’t understand why he gets to hold me hostage here. He’s the one who walked out. Not me. Plus, he’s richer than God. Anytime he wants, he could get on a plane and fly out to see Maya, if that’s what he really wants. But he doesn’t. He just wants to jerk me around.”

Letty began fast-forwarding through the videos, but each time the frames flashed by she was afraid she’d missed seeing something important.

In one of the videos in late January, mother and daughter were clearly having a no good, very bad day. Tanya struggled to get the little girl dressed, yanking Maya’s tights up as she protested that she wanted to wear pants. “Noooo!” Maya screamed as Tanya pulled a dress over her head, trying to bat her mother’s hand away as she fastened the buttons up the front. Each time Tanya managed to buckle one of the leather Mary Janes onto her child’s foot, Maya would grab the shoe and toss it across the room, laughing spitefully as Tanya, cursing under her breath, retrieved the shoe and repeated the process two more times. “Fuck it,” Tanya said, tucking a shoe in each of her back pockets. “Come on, we’re late.”