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The Warm Mug at Dawn: How He Erased Her World Quietly · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At five point forty in the morning on March ninth,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: a bird watcher named Emily Slater crouched at the lip
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: of a drainage culvert and wrapped her gloved hand around
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: a white ceramic coffee mug. The temperature was twenty one
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit. The mug was still warm. There was no
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: one within three hundred yards in any direction, and no
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: explanation for why a cup of coffee would be sitting here,
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: steaming alone, at the edge of a concrete drainage channel.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Before dawn, Emily had come out to track a great
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: horned owl, she photographed the mug instead. Then she called
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: the non emergency police line because she didn't know what
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: else to do with a cup of hot coffee at
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: the edge of a culvert in March. What investigators would
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: spend the next several months understanding is that the mug
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: was not a distress signal. It was not abandonment. It
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: was something harder to name, the physical record of a
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: decision that some one could no longer finish, and the
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: reason she could no longer finish. It had been two
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: years in the making. Diane Rafferty was thirty one years
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: old and had lived in Dellwood for four years. She
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: worked as a mid level compliance analyst at Kellner Financial Services.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: She had no room mates, no cohabitants, and a walking
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: routine she had maintained without interruption since her second week
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: in the city. Every morning, the same route past the
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Grain elevator on the south side of Merchant Street, where
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: she would touch the south wall with her right palm
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: as she passed. It was not a superstition. It was
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: a fixed point, something solid at the beginning of the day,
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: something that confirmed she was where she was. People who
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: knew Diane described her the same way every time warm
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: social some one who remembered the details of other people's
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: lives and asked about them the next time she saw them.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: She had been seeing her therapist, Karen Casey, every other
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Tuesday for three years. She had colleagues she liked, She
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: had plans. She was the kind of person who, in
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: her own estimation, did not isolate easily. That matters because
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: what happened to Diane over the next two years was
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: specifically designed for someone exactly like her. Grant Erickson was
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: forty seven senior compliance director at Kellner and had been
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: with the company for sixteen years. He was married, had
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: two children, and coached youth lacrosse on weekends. People at
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: Kelner described him consistently charming, precise, attentive to who was
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: doing good work and who was getting credit for it.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: He noticed things, he remembered things. He was, by most accounts,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: the kind of senior colleague a junior employee hopes to impress.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: In Diane's first month at Kelner, Ericsson identified her as
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: in his own recorded phrasing, worth developing. By month three,
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: a formal mentorship had been established under the company's internal program.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: By month six, Diane was routing most of her professional
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: ideas through Ericsson before raising them anywhere else. That progression
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: from new hire to mente to someone who filtered her
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: own judgment through a senior director looked from the outside
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: like a career taking shape. It looked like exactly what
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Ericson said it was. It wasn't, but the architecture of
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: what it actually was would take another eighteen months to
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: become visible, and by then several things would already be gone.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Patrise Odom worked at Kelmer and sat two rows from Diane.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Over the course of eighteen months, she invited Diane to
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: lunch six times. Diane declined, each time explaining that she
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: was behind on a project or had something due. Patrise
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: eventually concluded that Diane simply didn't like her. There was
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: no oh confrontation, Patrice just stopped asking what. Patrice didn't know.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: What she had no way of knowing was that Erickson
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: had told Diane she was a gossip whose friendships tended
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: to create hr problems. That was not true. When Detective
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: Marcus Webb interviewed Patrice Odam more than two years later,
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: she said she hadn't understood why Diane pulled back. She
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: still didn't entirely. Neil Farbur, the assistant manager at Kellner,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: had a similar experience from a different angle. Erickson told
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: Diane that Farbur routinely documented in formal communications from junior staff,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: and that anything said to him casually could appear in
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: a performance file That was also false. Farber confirmed it
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: directly to Webb during the investigation, but by the time
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: that confirmation existed, Diane had spent over a year treating
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Farbur as someone she could not speak to freely. Lies
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: were not dramatic. They were not the kind that invite verification.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: They were the kind that once planted simply changed the
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: shape of a person's world quietly, one relationship at a time,
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: until the number of people she might have turned to
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: had become very small, and the person she turned to
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: instead was the one who had done the removing. There
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: was a number buried in the building access logs that
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Detective Marcus Webb pulled from Kellner Financial Services in the
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: early weeks of the investigation. Not a dramatic number, not
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: the kind that announces itself. Forty one. That was the
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: count of times Grant Ericsson's access card had registered an
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: entry to the building at or before six in the morning,
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: over a period of fourteen months, forty one occasions. The
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: anomaly wasn't the number itself, It was the explanation, or
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: rather the absence of one. Ericsson's role as senior compliance
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: director carried no operational requirement for early arrival. He was
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: not a floor manager. He was not responsible for opening procedures.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: When Webb's team pulled the phone records attached to the justification,
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Ericson had given his wife early calls with Eastern time
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: zone clients. Those calls did not exist, not one of them.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: The calendar entries were there, the actual call logs were
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: not so. The question sitting inside that number was this,
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: what does a senior director do at six in the
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: morning in a building he has no professional reason to enter?
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: Webb Cross referenced the forty one entries against Diane Rafferty's
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: own arrival records. The overlap was not perfect. Nothing in
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: a real investigation, ever is, but it was consistent enough
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: to form a pattern. Ericson was arriving early on the
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: mornings Diane arrived early. He was with significant regularity. The
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: first senior voice she encountered when she walked in That
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: mattered for a reason that only became clear later. The
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: second denominaly emerged from a different direction. Entirely Sometime in
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: the first year of Diane's employment, Ericsson introduced her to
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: what he described as a continuing education initiative, an informal arrangement.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: He explained that Kellner quietly supported for high potential junior staff.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: The fund had a name, Trellis Advisory Group. He framed
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: it as confidential, which was reasonable, he said, because formal
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: recognition of the program could create equity concerns among staff
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: who weren't selected. He suggested that Diane not mention it
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: to colleagues, and that she route contributions directly rather than
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: through payable The implication was clear, this was a professional
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: investment in her and discretion protected both of them. Over
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: approximately two years, Dianne contributed three times, two hundred dollars
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: in the first year, three hundred in the second. Then
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: in January of the year the case broke open a
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: five hundred dollars wire transfer one thousand dollars total. When
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: Webb's team ran the LC registration for Trellis Advisory Group,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: what they found was this. The company was real. It
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: was registered, incorporated and operating. Grant Ericsson was its sole officer.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: It had never been disclosed to Kellner's HR department, no
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: other Keulner employee had ever been asked to contribute, and
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: the fund had no operational history that corresponded to any
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: continuing education activity of any kind. The language of investment
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: in her future had been, in practice, a private extraction
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: account with one client and one beneficiary, and they were
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: not the same person. What stayed with investigators wasn't just
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: the financial mechanism, It was the instruction to stake quiet.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Because if Diane couldn't name the fund to colleagues, she
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: also couldn't ask whether they'd heard of it. She couldn't
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: compare notes, She couldn't discover she was the only one.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: The secrecy that protected Ericson was framed at every step
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: as protection for Diane. Then came the email forensics, and
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: this is where the architecture of what Ericsson had built
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: stopped looking like a series of separate decisions and started
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: looking like a single, sustained design. Webb's team found fourteen
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: instances of unauthorized access to Diane Rafferty's Kellner inbox, not
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: from a remote server, not from a personal device, from
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Ericson's own workstation inside the building, using administrative credentials he
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: had no authorization to hold. The accesses spanned the same
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: fourteen month window as the forty one early morning entries.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: The last access was recorded three days before March ninth,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: three days before Diane stood at a chain link fence
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: for an hour and left her coffee on a culvert.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Up to this point in the investigation, the working assumption,
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: reasonable supported by the access laws, was that Ericsson had
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: positioned himself as the first voice Diane heard each morning
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: in order to shape her professional confidence in real time,
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: that he was controlling what she experienced by controlling when
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: and how he appeared. It was a coherent explanation, but
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: the email accesses collapsed that explanation, or rather they expanded
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: it into something more precise. He wasn't only shaping what
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: she experienced, He was reading what she was about to know.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: He sat at his desk, his own desk, with credentials
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: pulled from an administrative system he had no sanctioned reason
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: to access, and he read her inbox fourteen times over
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: fourteen months, which meant that when Diane Rafferty arrived at
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Kellner on the morning of March eighth, having decided something
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: had to change, having spent days or weeks formulating what
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: she was going to say, Ericsson already knew he had
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: read it. Whatever she had written, whatever she had researched,
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: whatever she had been preparing to confront him with, he
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: had already seen it before she arrived. The forty one
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: early entries and the fourteen inbox accesses were not two
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: separate behaviors. They were the same behavior expressed through different tools.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Arrive first, speak first, set the frame, then read what
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: she knew before she could use it. The physical positioning
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: and the digital surveillance were one mechanism, one continuous act
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: of ensuring that the only reality available to Diane was
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: the one he had already reviewed and arranged. There is
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: something that resists easy articulation when you hold those two
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: facts together, the access logs and the inbox records, side
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: by side. It isn't shock exactly. The numbers are too
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: specific for shock. It is something closer to recognition, the
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: belated understanding that what looked like mentorship, what felt from
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: the inside like professional guidance, had been from the beginning
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: a controlled environment, and Diane was the only person in
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: it who didn't know that. The question that follows from
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: that recognition is the one the case was never fully
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: able to answer, not legally, not on paper. But it
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: is the question that makes the mug on the culvert
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: mean what it means. If Erickson already knew what Diane
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: was coming to say on March eighth, if he had
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: read it, if he had read it, processed it, and
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: arranged himself accordingly before she walked in, then what happened
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: in that building, what was said, what didn't need to
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: be said, because he was already three steps ahead of
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: every word she had prepared The record does not detail
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: that conversation. Diane testified for four hours at trial and
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: did not cry. What the record shows is what happened.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: After she left the building. She walked to the chain
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: link fence at the edge of the service easement, three
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: hundred yards from the nearest Kellner entrance. She stood there
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: for approximately an hour. She drank the coffee she had
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: carried from her kitchen that morning. She set the mug
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: on the lip of the colvert, and she went home.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: She did not go back for the mug. She did
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: not go back to Kellner. She did not, for the
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: next six days, leave her apartment at all. Six days
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: after Diane set that mug on the covert lip, Vince
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Guerrero knocked on her door. He had noticed the absence
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: in the way neighbors noticed small things, the creak of
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: morning footsteps that didn't come, the absence of the sound
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: her door made when she left at the same time
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: she always left. Guerrero was a retired machinist. He told
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: investigators later that he had waited three days before knocking
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: because he didn't want to intrude. He waited three more
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: after that. When she opened the door on March fourteenth,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: Diane Rafferty was physically uninjured. Paramedics confirmed it. She had
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: not eaten a full meal in four days. She had
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: not answered her phone. She had by all external evidence,
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: simply stopped. Guerrero called her therapist. Karen Casey was there
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: within the hour. What followed over the next two months
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: was not dramatic in the way investigations are often described.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: Detective Marcus Webb pulled access logs. He pulled the Kellner
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: Facilities Committee minutes, which showed Ericson's documented knowledge of service
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: entrances and camera blind spots dating back four years. He
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: subpoened phone records and confirmed that the Eastern time zone
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: calls Ericsson had used to explain his early arrivals did
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: not exist. He contacted the Secretary of State's office and
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: found Trellis Advisory Group LLC, registered solely to Grant. Ericsson
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: never disclosed to Kellner's HR department, never participated in by
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: any other employee. The wire transfer of five hundred dollars,
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: the one Diane had sent in January, the last financial
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: contribution she made before she stopped coming in, went into
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: that account. Ericsson denied everything for eleven months. He denied
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: the early arrivals were anything other than professional diligence. He
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: denied knowing Trellis was undisclosed. He denied accessing Diane's inbox.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: He characterized their two year professional relationship as mentorship and
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: himself as a champion of junior staff development. He was
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: precise in his denials the way the record describes him
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: being precise about everything, the credit allocation, meeting agendas, who
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: got named in the quarterly report. The trial began in
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: February of the following year. Prosecutors introduced the wire transfer first,
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: then the access logs, then the LLC registration documents. Then,
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: during the forensic exhibit review of the email access records,
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: fourteen unauthorized entries from Ericson's own workstation, using credentials he
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: had no authorization to hold by grant. Erickson's lawyer asked
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: for a recess. What followed was characterized at sentencing as
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: a partial confession, a lapse in judgment. Rickson's attorneys framed
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: it not designed, not architecture. The jury did not agree
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: with the framing. He was convicted on three counts of fraud,
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: two counts of unauthorized computer access, and one count of
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: financial exploitation. He was sentenced to four years. He served
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: just under three. Diane testified for four hours. She described
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: the mentor relationship from its beginning. She described the lunch
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: invitations she had declined and the reasons she had believed
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: she was right to decline them, and when she learned
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: those reasons had been invented. She described the education fund
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: and what she had understood it to be and what
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: it was. She described standing at the chain link fence
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: with a cup of coffee in twenty one degree weather
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: and being unable to go in or go back. She
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: did not cry. Three months after Ericson's arrest, a detective
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: from vander Hill County contacted the Dellwood Police Department. Five
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: years earlier, a junior accountant named Kevin Pruett had lost
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: approximately two years of his professional life to a senior
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: colleague at a firm in that county. The pattern professional isolation,
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: controlled information flow, financial contributions to an undisclosed account was
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: nearly identical. The senior colleague had never been named in
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: any official record from that case. His name was Grant Ericsson.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: The statute of limitations had run, no charges were possible.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: The vander Hill case is documented now attributed to Ericson's
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: pattern in the investigative record, and otherwise closed. Kevin Pruitt
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: has not been identified in any public reporting as seeking
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: further remedy. The method worked once without consequence before it
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: reached Diane Rafferty. The thing that stays with this case,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: the thing that resists being filed away after the conviction
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: and the sentence and the statute of limitations and the
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: closed file from vander Hill County, is the precision of it.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: Is not the cruelty the precision grant Ericsson did not improvise.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: He arrived before Diane arrived forty one times over fourteen months,
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: to be the first voice she encountered in a building
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: where she had no other fixed allies. He registered a
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: company she would contribute to in silence, because he told
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: her the silence protected her. He read her inbox fourteen
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: times with credentials he was never authorized to hold, so
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: that on the morning she finally came to confront him,
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: he already knew every word she had prepared. Each if
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: those things in isolation is explainable. A senior director arrives early,
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: a mentor establishes a professional fund, an administrator accesses a
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: shared system. It is only when you hold all four together,
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: the physical positioning, the financial extraction, the information concealment, the
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: digital surveillance, that the architecture becomes visible, and the architecture
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: is the point. This was not a series of lapses.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: It was a single, continuous act, sustained over two years,
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: calibrated to ensure that the only external reality available to
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: Diane Rafferty was the one grant Ericsson had already reviewed
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: and arranged. What it cost her, concretely, two years of
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: professional relationships she had been told not to trust, one
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars she had been told was an investment in
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: her future, her ability by the end, to identify a
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: single person she could call without believe the call would
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: reach him, and six days in an apartment where she
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: did not eat, did not answer her phone, and did
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: not leave, not because something violent had happened, but because
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: the mechanism had run its course. Kevin Pruitt lost two
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: years before her without a name. Diane Rafferty gave the name.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: She sat in a courtroom and testified for four hours
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: and did not cry, and she gave the jury everything
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: the record could carry. In late April, several weeks after
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: the trial concluded, Diane returned to her walking rout. She
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: went alone. It was early morning, the way it had
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: always been. She walked the route she had walked for
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: four years, past the servicesman, passed the chain link fence,
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: past the culvert where Emily Slater had found a white
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: ceramic mug, still steaming at five point forty in the
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: morning in twenty one degree air. She reached the grain
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: elevator on the south side of the route. She touched
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: the wall with her right palm. She didn't tell anyone
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: she had done it. She didn't need to. The mug
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: was not a cry for help. It was not abandonment.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: It was the physical record of a moment when a
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: person's capacity to make a single, autonomous decision had been methodically,
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: patiently and completely moved. She knew she had left it.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: She could not go back for it, because going back
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: meant deciding, and she no longer trusted any decision she made.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: That is what two years of a controlled environment looks
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: like from the outside before anyone understands what they are seeing.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: The mug on the culvert, the steaming impossibility of it
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: at five forty in the morning, Emily Slater standing in
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: the cold with her gloved hand around the handle, not
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: knowing who to call, calling anyway, Diane Rafferty's right palm
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: on the south wall of the Grain elevator. In late
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: April alone, she came back. This show is made made
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: by Obo Media.