Finding Ashley - Danielle Steel Page 0,3
long time securely, not in luxury, but in comfortable circumstances, as long as they worked at solid jobs after they’d graduated from college.
At eighteen, when their father died, Melissa shouldered their responsibilities and handled them well, better than their parents had. She was bright, determined, and capable. She saw to it that they both attended good colleges, and made sure Hattie kept her grades up. She was serious beyond her years, less stern than their mother would have been, and far more responsible than their alcoholic father. She moved them to a decent, less expensive neighborhood in New York on the West Side, and stuck to a rigorous budget so what they had inherited would last as long as possible. And she took good care of Hattie. Everything seemed to be going well, and then Hattie had run away to the convent. It shattered Melissa’s world yet again. After caring for her sister for fourteen years, she suddenly found herself alone, and began writing more seriously then to fill the void and try to process why Hattie had abandoned her dreams.
Melissa vented her anger at their mother in her first, very dark book, which was an instant success. She could better understand her mother’s bitterness at finding herself a pauper when her parents died than she could fathom Hattie’s flight from life. It made no sense to her. She’d had such a bright future ahead.
Losing Hattie to the convent came as a severe blow. Melissa wrote incessantly after that to exorcise her demons, with excellent results, once she met Carson, he became her agent, and sold her books for real money. But, she had never forgiven Hattie for retreating to the convent, nor could Melissa understand what Hattie had done, or why. Hattie had real talent, and Melissa had encouraged her. Hattie had had a few small parts on daytime TV, and a walk-on in a Broadway show. She got a chance to audition for a movie then, and went to L.A. for a screen test. Faced with a real opportunity, she had panicked, come back from L.A. in less than a week, and told Melissa about her impulsive plan to join a religious order. She said it had been a lifelong desire she had hidden from her sister, knowing how Melissa hated nuns. Eighteen years later she had never forgiven Hattie and the two sisters were still estranged. Melissa had barely spoken to Hattie at Robbie’s funeral. She didn’t want to hear what her sister had to say, the platitudes that Robbie was in a better place and his suffering was over. They hadn’t seen each other since.
Melissa wrote to her once a year, as she did to Carson, mostly out of a sense of duty in her sister’s case. And Hattie dropped her a note from time to time, determined to stay in touch with the sister she still loved and always had. She was convinced that one day Melissa would come around and accept the decision she’d made, but there was no sign of it yet. Melissa preferred to be alone now. She didn’t want anyone’s sympathy, which rubbed salt in the wounds left by her losses. All she wanted was her house and the satisfaction it provided her. She didn’t need people around, and certainly not her cowardly sister who had run away from the world, or her ex-husband who had cheated on her and was married to someone else. And she didn’t need an agent anymore, since she had stopped writing. She didn’t “need” or want anyone.
The convent had sent Hattie to nursing school when she joined the order. She was a registered nurse now at a hospital in the Bronx. Melissa went to her graduation when she got her R.N., but had refused to attend the ceremony when Hattie became a novice, and later took her final vows. Melissa didn’t want to be there. It was too painful to see Hattie in the habit she wore.
After her vows, Hattie had spent two years working at an orphanage in Kenya, and had loved it. Her life had taken a completely different turn from Melissa’s, and she was content. Melissa said she was happy too, married, with a child and a successful writing career, but her sharp edges hadn’t softened with time. They had gotten harsher. And once Robbie died, the walls around her were insurmountable.
After she bought the house in the Berkshires, the men who worked for her considered her an honest