But greed does not ask questions, because questions might delay the payout, and to a greedy mind a delayed payout is a kind of pain.

All my mother and my brother could hear, under everything I said, was the single word million, repeating like a heartbeat, drowning out every warning the details were trying to give them.

I was not even lying to them, not really — I told them the money was real, and it was; I told them it was going into a trust, and it was; I simply let them assume it was a trust that included them, and they wanted so badly for that to be true that they built the assumption themselves and defended it against their own better judgment.

That is the thing about a trap baited with greed.