THE ALPHA’S REGRET のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 31 - チャプター 33

Catherine had not slept well.She did not consider this a weakness. She had not slept well on numerous occasions over the years when situations required thought rather than rest, and she had learned long ago that the hours between two and five in the morning were frequently more productive than the hours between nine and five in the afternoon, because they were quiet and uninterrupted and required her to rely entirely on her own reasoning rather than on the performance of reasoning that occupied so much of her waking day.She had spent them thinking about the phone call.By morning she had reached several conclusions and several more questions, and she carried both with her as she moved through the house in her usual manner, which was to say completely and without drawing attention to the fact that she was paying attention to anything in particular.The man on the phone had been controlled.That was what stayed with her most. Not the words, which were deliberately vague in the specifi

Tony had not been told about the phone call.He understood this the way he understood most things Catherine kept from him, not through being told but through the quality of silence that surrounded a subject when she considered it closed. She had mentioned, briefly, that Leslie had experienced some difficulty during the errand the previous night. She had said it in the tone she used for things she had already categorized and filed and did not intend to reopen for discussion.He had not pushed.He had learned, over a significant number of years, that pushing Catherine directly was the least effective method of learning what she actually knew.He stood now at the window of his study and looked at the grounds below and thought about the timing of it.Leslie had been sent out alone. At night. To a store across town that closed at nine, with no driver and no car and no backup arrangement if something went wrong. He had not been consulted on this and he had not known about it until afterward