The Dark Side - Danielle Steel Page 0,4

divorce, but there was a total absence of communication. They were completely out of step with each other, and Brad explained to Zoe, at the tender age of twelve and a half, that their marriage had died with Rose. Beth didn’t deny it. It was a relief for Beth in a way that he expected nothing more from her. All he wanted was out after two and a half years of intense mourning. He wanted to heal and move on. Beth simply couldn’t do it, at least not yet, and she wouldn’t even try.

Zoe knew her father was in therapy, and he mentioned vaguely that he had changed therapists around the time he filed for divorce. He didn’t explain why, until Zoe turned thirteen and the divorce was final. He had begun dating his therapist, and ethically, she had insisted that he find another therapist, and had helped him do it, a man. His original therapist, whom he had seen for six months, was a woman named Pam, which was all Zoe knew about her. Brad had just turned forty when the divorce became final, Pam was thirty-five, had never been married and had no children, and both of them wanted a fresh start in life. Her lover of several years had died, and Brad had lost his youngest child. They married within months of the divorce, and moved to Santa Barbara, where Brad bought a house and Pam joined another practice.

Zoe met Pam shortly before they got married, and felt disloyal to her mother when she did. Pam was a nice woman, and they both insisted that they wanted Zoe to visit whenever she wanted to, their home would be open to her at all times. But Beth managed to convey that whenever Zoe went to stay with them, she committed an act of treason. She didn’t have to say it, the message came through her pores, in her days of even heavier silence when Zoe got back. There was a stone wall between Zoe and her mother that she couldn’t scale, and hadn’t been able to for three years since Rose’s death. She still slept with Rose’s teddy bear, Pinkie, who felt like her only friend.

She started high school at fourteen, the same month that Brad and Pam’s first child was born, ten months after the wedding Zoe hadn’t attended, out of loyalty to her mother. Her new half-sibling was a baby boy named Christopher. Her father was over the moon about him. He had always wanted a son, and now he had one. Zoe felt left out of the circle of their love, and couldn’t bring herself to feel anything for the baby. Her sense of isolation was complete a year later, when their second child was born, a baby girl they named Ashley, who added insult to injury by looking shockingly like Rose, with white-blond hair that framed her face in the same way. Zoe couldn’t bear looking at her. She was fifteen when Ashley was born, five years after Rose’s death. Coincidentally, Beth went back to work then, as a nurse, after taking a refresher class. Her mother working changed very little in Zoe’s life, except that instead of sleeping all day as she had for five years, she was at work. She had been absent from Zoe’s life for what seemed like an eternity by then.

Beth began dating a doctor a year later, when Zoe was sixteen. He had children older than Zoe, whom she decided not to meet, and Beth didn’t insist. They weren’t getting married, they were only dating. Zoe went to Santa Barbara as seldom as possible. She had excluded herself from both her parents’ lives, just as they had excluded her for years. She was used to taking care of herself by then, and had been since she was ten. She was remarkably self-sufficient.

Zoe plunged herself into her studies all through high school, and had few friends. She didn’t want to explain to anyone the reasons for the strangeness of her home life, and her lack of engagement with her parents. Both of them had moved on, and accidentally left her behind, like a piece of luggage they had overlooked.

Neither of them was surprised when she was valedictorian of her class. They had come to expect nothing less of her, and didn’t seem to realize how remarkable it was that she had outstanding grades despite her lonely home life and lack of emotional support from her parents. She