Silent Fall

brown hair swept up under a veil. Tiny diamond earrings matched the diamond necklace around her neck. She was a pretty woman with a spark in her eyes that reminded Catherine of Dylan.
    Why had she walked away from Dylan and Jake? And just as important, why had she never come back?
    Maybe there was no good reason. Catherine had certainly grown up with a lot of kids who’d been deserted by their parents. That wasn’t a new story or even an unusual one. So why did she have the feeling that there was something about Dylan’s mother that needed to be discovered? It had to exist in her relationship with Richard.
    Putting the album aside, Catherine went through the rest of the dresser drawers, striking pay dirt when she got to the last one. It was filled with papers and envelopes and, most important, journals. She pulled out one after another, realizing that Dylan’s grandmother had kept diaries her entire life.
    She sat down on the floor, leaned her back against the wall, and began to read. The journals began almost sixty years earlier, when his grandmother, Ruth Monroe, had been a little girl. Catherine skimmed through the first book. Apparently Ruth had been born and raised in San Francisco. Her father had run a hardware store. Her mother had been a teacher. Ruth had been the oldest of three children and the only girl, which often made her feel like an outsider, as her brothers were inseparable.
    As she continued to read, she began to feel a connection to the little girl telling her life story in bits and pieces. Her heart began to open, and she felt the emotions when Ruth graduated from eighth grade, when she went to high school, had her first kiss, fell in love, lost that love and thought her heart was broken. She followed Dylan’s grandmother into her early twenties, to her first job as a receptionist at the San Francisco Herald and her desire to work her way up to reporter, only to continue to be shunted to the society and fashion pages instead of hard news.
    Catherine wondered if Dylan knew that his grandmother had shared his passion for journalism. Or maybe he did know, and that was why there was such a closeness between them.
    Eventually Dylan’s grandmother’s ambition was tempered by love. In covering a high-society party, she met and fell in love with Conrad Sanders, the executive vice president of an insurance company. Within a year they were married and expecting a baby, a girl they named Eleanor. Two miscarriages followed Eleanor’s birth, and Ruth despaired of ever giving her husband a son.
    Catherine wiped her eyes, feeling the woman’s sadness and burden as if they were her own. Then she smiled as she flipped through the pages and saw the entry announcing that she was pregnant. Ruth would have her baby boy. And she would name him Richard. Dylan’s father had certainly been wanted. And spoiled, according to Ruth, who had chronicled her years as a mother and her guilt at wanting to give everything to the son she had waited so long to have, even at the expense of favoring Richard over Eleanor. Treated in many ways like a little prince, Richard had apparently earned his sense of entitlement at an early age.
    As she picked up the next journal, Catherine realized she needed to turn on the lamp. The afternoon had passed and daylight had faded. Checking her watch, she realized it was almost seven. She’d been so wrapped up in the journals she’d lost track of time. The house was certainly quiet. Dylan must still be going over his tapes or working on his computer. Maybe she’d just read one more journal and then go see what he was doing.
    The next diary picked up years later, and her pulse quickened as she realized that Ruth was writing about the fact that her precious Richard had asked a woman to marry him. The young woman’s name was Olivia Marshall. She was a kindergarten teacher working at her first job. Richard’s father, Conrad, was not happy about his son’s choice. He thought Richard could have done far better than a teacher who came from a broken home and had not a speck of blue blood in her. But Richard was infatuated with Olivia. He’d even told his mother that Olivia had cast a spell over him. Ruth wrote in her diary that she was secretly thrilled about the match, because she thought Richard needed someone to soften him, to show him another side of life, but at the same time she also worried that Olivia wasn’t strong enough to