It was more than that, though I would not learn how much more until much later.

Ames was the kind of quiet that people mistook for coldness — a man who had built a company and buried a wife and raised a son he was privately disappointed in, and who watched more than he spoke.

I had loved him, in a wary way, during my marriage — the only one of them I had.

At the interminable Lockridge dinners, while the others performed their wealth at each other, Ames would catch my eye across the table with something that was almost an apology in it, and once, only once, after his son had said something cutting about my “little Army hobby,” the old man had said, quietly, into the silence, “It is not a hobby, Rhett.

Your wife has taken an oath.