The Dark Side - Danielle Steel Page 0,3

food.

Zoe always had the feeling that in their heart of hearts they believed that the best of their children had died, and they had been left with the “other one.” Their disappointment seemed total. Rose had been the little angel among them, and now she was gone. It never occurred to Zoe that if she had died and not Rose, they might have felt the same way about her. Zoe didn’t believe that. In their unrelenting grief, they made it clear that she was second best. They talked of Rose’s absence when they talked at all, and never of Zoe’s presence, as though she had become invisible. For two years after Rose’s death, her parents were emotionally inaccessible. She had to learn to take care of herself, to meet her own needs and expect nothing from them, which was all she was getting.

Her father was the first to awaken from the nightmare that had engulfed them. Zoe had just turned twelve, her parents waited for her in the kitchen when she came home from school, and told her they were separating. The pain had just deepened for her. She had clung to a wisp of hope that things would get back to normal again one day, but now even that hope was dashed. Her father told her the bad news as they sat at the kitchen table. Her mother said nothing, as though she had become mute. He explained that he’d wanted to go into therapy with her, and Beth had refused. He gentled it by saying she wasn’t ready. She looked dead as she sat staring at the dishwasher and not her daughter and didn’t speak, or try to explain what she was feeling. They all knew. She had given everything of herself to her daughter and lost her anyway, and now she was losing her husband too. She didn’t have the strength to resist. She was drowning, or already had.

“Can’t you two try to work it out?” Zoe asked in a pleading tone, as Brad slowly shook his head and Beth said nothing.

“I don’t think so,” he said softly, glancing at the woman who was still his wife, but was now unrecognizable as the woman he had loved. He couldn’t imagine her becoming that person again, and she refused to try. She had been turning down his pleas for marriage counseling since grief had overwhelmed them, with devastating results. “We’ll see what happens,” Brad said vaguely. He told Zoe they weren’t getting divorced yet, but he felt he needed counseling to help him get over Rose’s death. He thought they all did, but Beth insisted Zoe was fine. She was getting good grades in school, wasn’t on drugs or acting out. She was a child, she would survive it. Beth wasn’t sure that she herself would. She thought probably not. And she felt Brad’s wanting to get past it was a form of betrayal. His wanting to get over their crippling grief felt to her like an abandonment of their daughter, and his wife. She was intending to mourn forever, to honor Rose, while once again overlooking Zoe in the process. Zoe was used to it by now, from both of them. They only thought of themselves and what they were feeling. After all they had done for Rose, she had never before realized how selfish they were.

Brad moved out that weekend. He’d found a studio apartment on Broadway in a building that people referred to as the Heartbreak Hotel. It was usually the first step in a divorce, while people got their bearings. There was nowhere for Zoe to stay in the apartment. He took her to dinner once a week, which meant that her main caretaker for all four years of her sister’s illness, and the two years since, had jumped ship and become an occasional visitor. Her mother was even more withdrawn after he left. She hardly came out of her room anymore. Zoe cooked her own meals in the kitchen, cans of ravioli or spaghetti, frozen dinners her mother bought and left in the freezer for her to prepare. Beth hardly ate and had lost a shocking amount of weight. Zoe had gotten much thinner too. They all had.

Six months after he had moved out, Brad told Zoe over dinner that he had filed for divorce. Beth was still refusing any form of therapy, and would barely speak to him. There was no malice in the separation, or even in the