Chapter 5 — WHAT ROZ SAW

Rosalind Neto was twenty-six and had been at Wren House for two years and three months, and her English is better than mine on any subject involving a legal document.

The first thing she said to me, in the hospital corridor, three days later, was, "I'm sorry I didn't run."

I told her four seconds is not a length of time.

She did not believe me and she still does not.

Roz's statement is eleven paragraphs and it does two things that no other piece of evidence in the case could do.

The first is that she was standing at the far end of that landing looking directly down the length of it.

Every other version of that moment is Margot's version or mine.

Roz saw it side-on, from thirty feet away, with an uninterrupted line of sight, and what she wrote down was: Mrs. Halloway's right hand was on Mrs. Thorne's left shoulder. Mrs. Thorne was facing Mrs. Halloway and had her back to the railing. Mrs. Halloway stepped forward with her whole body. Mrs. Thorne's feet did not move.

Her feet did not move.

That is the sentence that ended the trip-and-fall defence, and it came out of a twenty-six-year-old carrying towels.

The second thing Roz did is worse and better.

She had been in that house long enough to have a memory of what happened the last time somebody at Wren House had an accident.

In June of the previous year — four months before Adam died — Margot had put in an insurance claim for a fall on the terrace steps.

Roz had been asked to sign something about it.

She had signed it without reading it, because she was twenty-five and on a sponsored visa and a woman with a lawyer had put a page in front of her.

What she had signed said she had witnessed the terrace steps being wet and unsalted.

She had not witnessed that.

She had not been at the house that day at all.

That claim paid out eleven thousand dollars and nobody ever asked her another question about it.

When Bramwell pulled the file, there was a second one from 2016, and a third from 2009.

Three claims in fifteen years, all involving falls, none involving Margot herself.

"It doesn't prove anything about your case," Bramwell told me, in a chair beside my hospital bed with her coat still on. "I want to be honest with you about that. A judge might not even let it in."

"Then why does it matter?"

"Because it tells me what kind of house it is." She clicked her pen. "In some houses, when something goes wrong, everybody looks for the reason. In other houses, everybody looks for the paperwork."

I asked her what happens now.

She said, "Now you have a baby."

"I'm thirty-four weeks."

"Mrs. Thorne," she said, "you fell fourteen feet yesterday. You're having a baby this week."

I had her nine days later.