She had requested a payoff statement on the North Park duplex, which arrived at her office rather than her home.

She had looked up three family law attorneys and called one.

And on the Tuesday before she died, she had gone into her firm’s HR system and changed her emergency contact from her husband to her mother.

That last one was found by an investigator doing routine work in the ninth month and it stopped the whole room.

Margaret was told about it in a conference room by a prosecutor who had clearly decided in advance how to say it, and she has described what happened in her chest as something physically separate from grief.

Because it meant her daughter had known.