Twelve sounded young to him, given most women weren't of an age for children until years later, wasn't that true? He briefly wondered why that was the case, but decided it was no less weird than how she'd married two people at once: concubines not being part of his world view, but one in peripheral he could loosely understand. Still, her phrasing of it puts him in a particular mindset.

"You had an older husband and an older wife?" Presuming when they died of illness it wasn't one that struck the young at healthier ages. "My apologies for the losses."

One shouldn't congratulate a person on losing spouses, generally speaking, though he wasn't sure what was really due here. Was it good? Bad? She'd lived alone for five years since the death of both spouses, and spaced years between then. What was all this about grids, too? The language was so obscure to him in concept he simply didn't know.