For a few seconds, she didn’t move.
Then she looked toward the front door.
“That Catherine?”
Dad nodded.
I had never heard that name before, but Mom clearly had.
She slowly sat back down.
“William… she’s alive?”
“Yes.”
Mom covered her mouth.
That was when I realized this wasn’t about an affair.
It was something much older.
Something that had happened before my parents were even married.
Dad finally began explaining.
When he was twenty-four, years before he proposed to Mom, he had been engaged to another woman named Catherine.
Not because he loved her.
Because their families expected it.
Catherine’s father and my grandfather had worked together, and everyone had assumed the two of them would eventually marry.
But Dad had already met Mom.
He just hadn’t told anyone.
Then, only weeks before the planned engagement announcement, Catherine disappeared.
Her family said she had moved away.
