Nine Lives - Danielle Steel Page 0,18

business now or later, so you know how interested I am. And my son Bill would love it.” She nodded, feeling dazed. If she sold it to him, she would wind up with somewhere around two million dollars. What would she do with that kind of money? She couldn’t imagine.

He reminded her to call the insurance company when she left, and she drove home feeling distracted and separate from her body somehow. She should have been relieved about the money, but she wasn’t. It just made her feel guiltier for surviving when Brad hadn’t. And now she was making money from it.

She felt even worse after she called the insurance company. She had assumed that he had some ordinary policy, like fifty or a hundred thousand dollars she could put into Aden’s college fund. College was expensive, and she and Brad had talked about that a lot. But Brad was a prudent, responsible man. He had been paying for years for a three-million-dollar life insurance policy, in case anything ever happened to him, so he would leave his family secure for life.

“Three million?” Her voice was a high-pitched squeak when the agent she spoke to told her, almost as a routine matter, which he assumed she knew. She didn’t. “Oh my God.” It was getting worse. Not only was she profiting from his death, she was getting rich. In a single day, she had discovered that she had four million dollars now, with what Brad had left them and his life insurance policy. And if she sold the business to Phil, she’d have five million eventually. She hung up the phone, feeling frightened and confused, and half an hour later, she had a migraine headache and went to bed. She had taken a painkiller and was in a deep sleep when Aden came home. She woke up when he sat on her bed to check on her.

“Bad day, Mom?” he asked her gently. He could see that it had been. Most days were now. She was beginning to remind herself of her own mother and hated herself for it.

“Yes…no…I don’t know. Kind of.” Finding out they had four million dollars didn’t really qualify as a bad day. Brad could have left her destitute or close to it, like her father had done, leaving only his military pension, but that wasn’t her husband’s style. But how she had gotten the money was devastating. She got up and went downstairs to start dinner. She brought up the business when Aden sat down at the table with her. She asked him about his career plans now, and felt foolish doing so. He was still the same seventeen-year-old high school kid he had been a month before, when his father was still alive. Nothing had changed, even if he seemed more grown up now. But his future was still a blank page to him, maybe even more so now without his father to guide him.

“Can you see yourself stepping into Dad’s shoes at the office one day, when you’re older?”

“Never,” he said without hesitating. He could be more honest with her than he had been with his father, not wanting to hurt his feelings since Aden knew how hard his dad had worked to build something for them for the future. “I’d rather die than be an accountant like Dad. I don’t know how he stood it. It’s so boring, and I’m terrible with numbers.” She knew that was true, but it could change if he tried to learn the business. Brad had actually enjoyed it. “I want to do something more exciting. I want to take flying lessons,” he said, and Maggie felt her stomach turn over.

“Could we pick something a little more middle-of-the-road? Like a career where you don’t risk your life every day? My father, my brother, and your father all died in accidents related to flying. How about something less dangerous than flying?” she reasoned with him.

“I’d rather be a plumber, or dig ditches, than be an accountant.” He said it with fervor, and Maggie felt her heart sink, knowing Brad would have been disappointed too, although not surprised. He wasn’t sure Aden would ever be cut out for the family business, although he’d hoped he’d grow into it one day. “Why?” She decided to tell him about Phil at least, not the insurance. She had decided not to tell him about that. He didn’t need to know how much money they had now, not until he