Asking the right question....

might give me a clue!

There is a storyline in which the action turns on the traveller asking the right question - because he may be asking the wrong person. He uses the answer to make a decision about which road he should take. It has been used many times, especially in detective novels. It often used to misdirect. I think it may also have been misdirecting me.
I have been following Nicola Morgan's blog about her new book, "Wasted". There has been a discussion about things like luck, chance, fortune telling, whether it is possible to foresee the future, Schrodinger's cat and quantum physics.
Do we make our own luck? Are there things outside of our control? Why do we choose to do what we choose to do? I am trying to write something based on a real life incident. (It was not something I planned to write at all but it kept getting in the way of other things.) The real life incident is not something that will stand alone. There is a parallel story line. It is less dramatic but still important because - and this is where I made my mistake - the two things must come together in the right way. The real life incident has to take the correct path. I was asking the right question of the wrong person.
Fortunately I can travel back to that point in my writing and ask the right person. In real life I would not have been that 'lucky'.