Water leak timeline cracks case in designer's bathtub death at NYC hotel

In the early hours of December 9, 2010, a young fashion designer named Sylvie Cachay was found submerged in an overflowing bathtub at a Manhattan hotel, her life and her ambitions extinguished at twenty-four. What justice could not extract from witnesses or confessions, it found instead in the indifferent testimony of water — a leak seeping through a floor below, marking the precise minutes in which her boyfriend Nicholas Brooks was last inside that room. Three years later, a jury weighed the evidence and found him guilty of second-degree murder, a verdict built not on words but on the quiet,