Why would she?

I was the eccentric father-in-law with the coupons.

She said what she thought in front of me, did what she wanted in front of me, because she had catalogued me as harmless and stopped watching.

And Garnet — Garnet had grown up standing on ground he assumed was his, the house, the trust, the whole comfortable platform of his life, and it had genuinely never occurred to him, not once, to check whose name was actually on the deed.

He thought the platform was his inheritance.