I’ve been sitting in a hallway.

I couldn’t make my hands work.”

She drove down from Escondido and was at the hospital in Mission Valley by nine-thirty.

Here is what she found when she got there, and she has gone over the order of it many times since, because the order is what eventually convinced her.

By nine-thirty on Sunday morning — ten hours after his wife was declared — Nathan Brooks had:

Selected a funeral home.

Signed an authorization for the transfer of remains.

Booked a chapel service for Tuesday at eleven.

Chosen a minister.

And scheduled a cremation for Tuesday afternoon, immediately following the service.

He told her all of this in a family consultation room with a box of tissues on the table between them, holding a paper cup of coffee he never drank, and his hands were shaking so badly that the surface of it moved.

She wants that on the record too.

The shaking was real.

She has never been able to decide what it meant.