He was never rude about it; he was a courteous man.

But there had been a reserve in him, a careful watchfulness around my husband that I had chalked up, at the time, to the ordinary difficulty a father has handing his daughter to any man.

And when he set up the family trust, in the last years of his life, he had structured it with a thoroughness that struck me, then, as excessive — layers of protection, conditions, a wall of legal language I only half understood, all of it built to keep the assets bound to me and my children and nearly impossible for anyone else to reach.

I remember thinking he was being overcautious, a little paranoid, the way careful old men sometimes are.