They never got to dinner.

That had been stupid. Hot but stupid. She had been engaged, for God’s sake. But reeling from what just happened to her honest, dutiful father—arrested! facing prison!—and she was questioning everything. Why do the prudent thing (which she had always done)? Why do the right thing (which she had always done)? Why do anything? And if a man who was sexy and smart and funny and sitting across from her with a killer smile and brushing her hand as he reaches for his glass and just that brush makes her feel something and they have a drink and then another and he is definitely coming on but not obnoxiously so and the feeling grows and it grows then why the hell not? She wasn’t married. Not yet.

“So,” said Rafe, “whatever happened with Hector?”

“Victor,” Catherine said.

They were at an outdoor table at the Café du Centre on the Place du Molard. Around the corner, on the Rue du Rhône, Russian oligarchs and Arab oil princes and their wives in furs or burqas were buying hundred-thousand-dollar watches and twenty-thousand-dollar handbags, tossing them into shopping baskets like cantaloupes. In some of the stores there, you could find a plain cotton shirt for less than a thousand dollars. If you looked hard enough.

“Victor,” said Rafe.

“I called off the engagement,” Catherine said. “I realized it wasn’t right. Obviously.” Victor was a lawyer in Houston now. He had a wife and a baby. He sent Catherine Christmas cards. The baby looked like Victor. Unfortunately, it was a girl.

“Oh,” said Rafe. “I didn’t know.”

“No,” said Catherine. “You were gone by then.”

“You kind of told me to go, if I remember correctly.”

“You didn’t need much encouragement to follow what’s-her-name to California.”

“School was over. I didn’t feel like hanging around Cambridge for your wedding, to which, by the way, I wasn’t invited.”

Fair enough. Catherine recalled she hadn’t gone out of her way to let him know the wedding was cancelled. His absence made her life easier, easier to plow ahead, to do what she had to do, undistracted. To stand by her father. To launch a career. A prosperous career.

A waiter came to take their orders. Mushroom risotto for her, a seafood platter for him. The sun was bright and the air smelled fresh and clean and there were people all around, seated at other tables or strolling through the square or standing in line outside the ice cream parlor. Catherine had picked the spot for this lunch, a very public place. Interesting, she thought—as if she’d been afraid he would try to kidnap her?

Rafe had said something.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing. Just reminiscing about Professor Nitzberg.”

She remembered. “Capitalism and the State. The token socialist. Why did we even take that course?”