The Affair - Danielle Steel Page 0,39
about her job in fashion, and Athena had fun with her TV show and loved cooking, and Nadia had always loved her interior design work. She had important clients all over Europe, and had done two big apartments in New York and a spectacular vacation home in the Dominican Republic for one of her French clients recently, before the storm hit.
Each of them had been lucky to find their chosen path early on, just as their mother had. Their father had had a distinguished career in investments and was respected in the financial community. Everyone knew and liked Wallace McCarthy. But none of the girls was drawn to the world of finance. He was the perfect balance to Rose, serious and grounded while she was creative. He had been a devoted father, interested in each of them, encouraging them at the start of their careers. He had died young, four years before, at seventy-two. Orphaned while he was in college, he made his family all-important to him once he married Rose and the girls were born. He was ten years older than their mother, and although old-school and traditional, he wasn’t stuffy. He had liked Ben and Nicolas immensely, and eventually got used to Joe and saw his merits, although he was somewhat unorthodox and informal, by their father’s standards. He had always worried that Harley was too old for Olivia, particularly since they married when Olivia was still in law school, and Harley was in his forties. Harley was closer to her parents’ age than to hers, but the marriage had proven solid, and her father had finally given up his objections, and had a good relationship with Harley. As Rose pointed out to her husband, his concerns about his daughters’ choices of men wouldn’t change anything anyway. Olivia had always been headstrong and did what she wanted fearlessly. In Harley’s case, her instincts had been right. She was still happy with him fifteen years later, more now than ever.
The girls had lived well growing up on the Upper East Side of New York in a brownstone their parents had bought before it cost a fortune to buy one. They didn’t live lavishly, but they were more than comfortable and had everything they wanted, went to private schools and the best colleges. They had all gone to Spence, a fancy venerable private girls’ school. Venetia had made her debut, after Athena had refused to. Venetia only did it so she could wear a fabulous white dress and have a Cinderella night at the cotillion. Olivia had objected to the whole concept, politically, at eighteen, and refused. Nadia had made her debut because she knew her parents wanted her to. She knew how much it meant to them, which hadn’t concerned Athena and Olivia.
Nadia hated disappointing her parents, and tried hard not to. She was the most traditional of all of them. Olivia was extremely liberal politically in her teens, and was influential in women’s causes, but grew increasingly conservative with age, and under Harley’s influence. Athena had no politics, except where it affected dogs, and animal testing of any kind, and she was against capital punishment. Olivia was in favor of it now. Venetia got the news of the world filtered through the eyes of Women’s Wear Daily, the influential online trade publication of the fashion world, and the rest she read in Vogue and The Business of Fashion, also online. Nadia liked to read The New York Times, Le Figaro, and The Wall Street Journal when she had time to stay abreast of the news in the States. That way, she could talk intelligently with her clients and knew what was going on. Athena wrote articles for culinary magazines, and the readers loved them. She’d had a Q&A column for years in Gourmet magazine, but now wrote a blog on her website instead, and she posted beautiful photographs of food on her Instagram every day. They were happy, secure, stable women, who were each on the right path for them. And they had made good choices as adults, about their men, their careers, and their lives.
“I don’t know how you have time for that,” Olivia had commented to Athena while she was cutting and chopping things for their dinner that night. She was preparing tiny, delicate fraises des bois for dessert, with crème fraîche, which looked irresistible, and she photographed them for Instagram.
“Social media is so time-consuming,” Nadia complained to her.
“It’s an essential tool for