I don’t think Pamela Gable sat in her apartment in Denver constructing a plan.

I think she genuinely liked us, in the way you like a house you are considering buying.

And I think that somewhere in the second year, when the thing became real — when there was a date and a venue and a dress — something underneath came up through the floor.

Something that could not tolerate the arrangement she had actually agreed to, which was to marry a man who was going to keep loving somebody else’s memory for the rest of his life, and to be the second most important person in a nine-year-old’s home.

She had said she could do that.

I believe she believed it.