On Monday afternoon Margaret asked Nathan, directly, standing in his kitchen while he made tea he didn’t drink, whether he would consider a private autopsy.

She was careful about how she framed it.

She said it was for her, and for Sophie later.

She said that arrhythmias can be inherited, and that if there was something structural, Sophie would want to know at twenty-five, and that a cardiac panel was the responsible thing to do for a child.

That argument was true.

It is also, as she found out much later, the single most effective argument available in that conversation, and she made it by accident.