I sat in a folding chair in a laundromat and understood something I did not enjoy understanding.

I had walked in there having decided what she was. I had decided it before I saw her face, on the basis of what she had done to my daughter’s marriage, and I had been prepared to hear nothing.

And two years ago I had decided what Daniel was — decided it standing in a church in a navy suit with a hand on my shoulder — and had been prepared, for two years, to hear nothing.

The same mechanism. The exact same one. Once in his favor and once against hers, and both times it ran without me noticing it was running.

That is the thing about being a man people call *sir*. You spend forty years believing your judgment is a trained instrument, and then you find out it has been sitting on the shelf next to your manners the whole time.

I said, “Miss Ashford, I need to ask you something, and it’s going to sound like a trap.”