Three days passed before Conrad said anything.
That was the thing about my father that people who hadn't lived inside his particular methodology didn't understand. He was not a reactive man. Reactive men were loud and immediate and spent their force all at once, which meant you could see them coming and brace for the impact and recover in the aftermath. Conrad was not like that. Conrad was the kind of man who noticed something and said nothing and went about his business and let the silence do its work while he built something in the background that you wouldn't see until it was already complete.
The three days were not nothing.
The three days were him deciding something.
Celeste and I did not speak about the study during those days. We spoke around it, in the two-level register, in th
