# Chapter 70: Midpoint
Roman was in his study at eleven.
No whiskey. He hadn't been drinking the way he had been drinking in the months before the divorce and the months immediately after. That had been a specific kind of numbing, and he had stopped it without making a dramatic decision about stopping it, the way you stopped things sometimes when the reason for them had quietly changed.
He was reading. A book Felix had mentioned offhandedly at the conference, the way Felix mentioned things he thought were worth someone's time. Roman had ordered it the following week and had been working through it slowly for a month. He read differently now. Not the way he used to, with one part of his attention while the rest of him was somewhere else. He was learning to put all of it in one place.
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