Diving had made Catherine brave. She had taken it up because she wasn’t. She’d been a shy child. A normal mother would have taken note of that and helped ease her daughter’s way into the world. But Catherine’s mother had been self-involved, trying to establish herself as an abstract artist, too busy painting and hustling around galleries to devote much time to Catherine. She figured school would socialize her daughter; it had socialized her. Catherine’s father, more attuned, encouraged Catherine to join after-school activities and often carted her there himself, leaving early from the office where his employer was busy swindling hundreds of people of millions of dollars (what had her father known? had he suspected? had he turned a blind eye?). She liked dance classes, but when her school required a sport and soccer was king, Catherine backed off. Too many people in bumping confusion on the field. Swimming was an option. Better. And from that she migrated to diving, where she could be even more alone. But diving forced one to be brave. The twisting dives where you lost orientation, the reverse dives where your head flew inches past a concrete platform. The ten-meter! She was surprised by how brave she could be. It was a happy surprise, and it gave her confidence. She could make friends. Or leave them. She could endure the competition of business school, and break up with a wrong fiancé, and take a job in a foreign country. She could start an affair with Majid, and now seem to have another one going as well. So why, she wondered, had she lost her courage with Stanley Pleski? He couldn’t implicate her in money laundering without incriminating himself. As for being an accomplice in the death of her idiot boss, who for all she knew had died solely because he was a lousy sailor, which he very likely must have been . . . it was ridiculous. So why had she agreed to help solve Pleski’s “problem”? Because the return of Rafe had knocked her off balance? Because she had been happy that Barnstable was dead? Because she had somehow known that Pleski’s money was dirty and had turned a blind eye? Because she was her father’s daughter?

Alone in her apartment with a glass of chilled vodka, she tried to sort that out. And quit trying when she realized it didn’t matter which of it was true or if all of it was or none of it. All that mattered, now, was what to do now. She knew what she wanted to do, and she knew she could. She had done dives like the reverse one and a half, with twists. She had made a nervy bet in the bond market and won. She would get Stanley Pleski out of her life.

Also, she should probably drink a little less.