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cliques of investors together for ventures that Sean thinks have a lot of upside potential but could never get past the loan committee at your average bank. The Woodshed is a good example: you can’t outsource curbside meal service to China; the real-wood-chip-cooking thing is a marketing hook; and if you could franchise the concept across the South and Midwest, in three years you’d need lawn and garden bags to haul your money to the bank. That’s Sean’s vision, anyway, and he’s right a lot more often than he’s wrong. One of the reasons is that before he invests penny-one he dives in and does hands-on stuff in the business until he feels like he really knows it. That’s why he was helping out behind the counter today.
    Sean plays bigger than he looks, as basketball coaches sometimes say about small forwards. He’s an inch or so under six feet, and packs less than a hundred seventy pounds on a compact frame. Somehow, though, he takes up more space than that. I’ve never seen him strut, but he doesn’t just walk, either. He strides or paces or does something damn close to marching. He treats conversation almost as a contact sport—I think that tying his hands would strike him mute. Even when he stands in still silence his eyes sweep the area around him in a measured, curious way. Under a generous mane of gray and white hair bespeaking his fifty-plus years, his face cycles through puckish, intrigued, skeptical, welcoming, and jovial expressions, all over a smile that gives away absolutely nothing. Radiating positive energy, he generally seems to be the center of any group that includes him.
    The prominent Wall Street law firm of Calder & Bull, which spent three years paying me more money than anyone my age who can’t dribble has any business getting, accused me of stealing Sean when I left to set up a solo practice here in Pittsburgh. Calder & Bull got things exactly wrong. Sean stole me from C&B—and it was C&B’s own damn fault. But that’s another story.
    â€œDid you get a chance to talk with Abbey while I was trying to shake euros out of Germans across the pond?”
    â€œI spent most of Sunday before last with her. A very together lady. Congratulations.”
    â€œThank you. Did you get anywhere on our little canon law adventure?”
    Sean’s light-hearted tone didn’t fool me. I knew that in his mind, our “little canon law adventure” ranked well ahead of the potential investment group for the Woodshed and whatever he had going in Europe.
    In calling the forty-seven-year-old package of brains, energy, and common sense named Abigail Northanger “together,” I wasn’t just stroking an important client; I meant it. On the Sunday I’d referred to I’d watched her absorb a solemn explanation of Purgatory at a class for future Catholic converts in the morning and then heard her laugh her head off at a Fifty Shades of Grey parody during a matinee that afternoon.
    Sean wanted to marry Abbey. He wanted to marry her in the Roman Catholic Church, in front of a priest who would bless their rings and formally witness their sacramental union during a proper wedding Mass with all the bells and smells the Church provides. And he wanted to marry her before sexual intimacy between them. A lot of people I know would have called that quaint or even morbidly repressed; it struck me as kind of sweet.
    Unfortunately, twenty-six years earlier an Elvis impersonator had pronounced Tally Rand and Abigail Northanger man and wife in the 24/7 Chapel O’ Love on Fashion Center Boulevard just off the Strip in Las Vegas. A Nevada judge had dissolved their union less than a year later, but the Church gives zero weight to a secular jurist’s opinion on the bonds of matrimony. That meant that Abbey needed to get this so-called “marriage” formally annulled before she and Sean could tie the knot.
    â€œI made some progress,” I