She had gone looking, after my call, through Garnet’s recent contacts with her office, and she had found something she wanted me to hear from her directly.

Two weeks before the wedding, my son had asked her a question.

He had framed it as ordinary estate planning, the sort of thing a young man getting married might reasonably wonder about, and at the time she had noted it as slightly odd and otherwise harmless and moved on.

He had asked whether marriage would accelerate his inheritance — whether, if something were to happen to both his parents, being married would change what came to him, and how quickly.

I want to be careful here, because I have turned this over many times and I do not know, to this day, exactly what was in my son’s mind when he asked it.