The Dark Side - Danielle Steel Page 0,5
had gotten in to almost every college she applied to, and accepted a place at Yale, as a pre-med student. Her goal was to become a pediatrician in underdeveloped countries and save the lives of children who might die otherwise.
Both her parents had come to her high school graduation and said they were proud of her, which she found hard to believe. They barely knew her or anything about her. She felt as though they had divorced her before they even dissolved their marriage. The family she had grown up in for six happy years had disappeared. They were strangers to each other now. Zoe found every excuse she could not to go home to either of them for holidays when she was in college. Seeing her half-sister had remained acutely painful. Ashley was three when Zoe started college, and continued to remind everyone of Rose. She was the image of her.
Zoe graduated from Yale with honors. She hadn’t enjoyed her years in college, but had done well. She had dated very little, and remained closed with everyone she met.
She was accepted into medical school at Duke, and excelled for two years, when a summer of soul-searching made her realize that she didn’t want to spend the next seven years in medical school, and as an intern and resident. She wanted more instant gratification, and to do some good in the world.
She took a leave of absence from medical school and went to work for a non-profit, a shelter for abused children on the Upper West Side in New York. She was direly needed there and could relate to the children, who were in deep physical and emotional pain. The reasons for their grief were different from hers. Most of them had been physically abandoned by their parents. She had been emotionally abandoned, but the agony was similar, and she related to them immediately. The children and her superiors could see Zoe’s empathy.
Her medical training was helpful to her, and she eventually got a master’s at NYU in the administration of non-profits.
She was twenty-four when she left medical school, and made rapid advances in the hierarchy of the non-profit. She loved the anonymity of living in New York, in a studio apartment she found in the West Village. Her father and Pam visited her whenever he went to see his publisher. Her mother never traveled. She had sold the house in San Francisco by then, and moved into an apartment with the doctor she had dated for almost ten years. Beth told her there was a room for her, but Zoe never used it. She had no desire to stay with either of her parents and they didn’t insist. They were both a powerful reminder of a painful past that each of them had managed to survive differently, either by forging new lives or running away, which was Zoe’s way of dealing with the past. Whenever they saw her, Pam expressed her concern about her, and told Brad she wished that Zoe would seek therapy. Pam thought she was too removed, too disengaged. There seemed to be a part of her that never really connected with people, even with the children at the shelter, whom she claimed she cared about so much. Pam didn’t believe her. But Brad insisted she was doing fine. He always reminded Pam that she’d had remarkable academic success, and was now in a job that satisfied her deeply. He thought she was happy, which wasn’t a word Pam would have used to describe her. Both professionally and personally, Pam could sense how abandoned Zoe had felt by all of them, and how scarred she was as a result. Zoe’s lack of serious attachment to any man, or even her parents, concerned Pam. Some part of her was missing, had died within her or was too damaged to engage. Outwardly, Zoe appeared to be fully functional, to a high degree, but Pam was afraid it was more of an act than real.
Brad had done well emotionally thanks to Pam, and the love of their children, which had healed him. He cared about Zoe too but no longer knew how to reach her. Beth was happy with the man she lived with, but deeply affected by the loss of her youngest child. She was a quiet woman whose pain was etched on her face.
At twenty-eight, Zoe was assistant administrator of the non-profit in New York, where she still worked. She was considered gifted with abused