Nine Lives - Danielle Steel Page 0,49

He is hot! He’s great looking, and in the real world, he’s still pretty young.” At forty-nine, he was younger than Brad, and better looking, which wasn’t what mattered to Maggie, any more than Paul’s boat or his plane. They were just nice add-ons, but they weren’t the main event for her. “I’m sorry I won’t get to meet him. We could use a little window dressing around here.” Her own husband was very good-looking, tall, athletic, with a great body. He kept in shape, worked out every day before work, and got up at four a.m. to do it. Helen worried about the women he met at work, who were twenty years younger than she was. She was two years younger than Maggie and the interns they hired at the agency were fresh out of college. Fortunately, most of them drove Jeff crazy. He said it was like hiring teenagers, and they weren’t far from it. The agency had a game room for them now, and a candy bar, to keep them happy on their breaks. All the ad agencies and start-ups had them. Helen’s boys loved going to visit him at the office so they could play. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do now?” Helen changed the subject, but Maggie still didn’t know. She had thought about all kinds of options, from volunteer work to going back to school for a master’s in art, but nothing felt right so far.

“I thought about volunteering at the convalescent home here, but it sounds so depressing, talking to old people with dementia. It reminds me of my mother at the end. There has to be something more fun that I can do. Maybe something at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Even a class. There were so many great small art galleries in Paris. I thought about opening one here. But I’m not sure people buy art in Lake Forest. They go to the city for that, to give some weight to it.” Helen didn’t disagree with her.

“What about Brad’s old firm?” Helen knew she had sold it.

“They don’t need me. And I think it would remind me too much of Brad. Every time I’ve gone there, I expect him to walk out of his office, and say he was just kidding, and has been hiding for a year.”

“I know. I felt that way about my sister. Every time I went home, I expected her to be there, for years.”

“I’ve given myself till January to come up with an idea for work of some kind. It’ll be here any minute, and I’m no closer to figuring it out than I was eleven months ago. It’s hard to invent a career out of whole cloth. I didn’t exactly have a booming career before I married Brad. I worked for him, as a receptionist at his accounting firm.”

“You married the boss’s son. As my mother-in-law says, it’s nice work if you can find it.” They both laughed and bantered back and forth for a while, and then Helen had to drop off a forgotten lunch at school for one of her boys. She seemed to be doing fine without her oldest son, since he was at Yale, but she still had the two younger ones at home, which helped. Maggie didn’t have that consolation with an only child. And with a late baby, Helen wouldn’t be facing an empty nest for another twelve years. Maggie envied her that. They agreed to have lunch the next day before they hung up, and Maggie was glad they’d talked. That way, she wouldn’t have to rehash everything about Paul the next day.

It didn’t help when three dozen red roses arrived from a local florist that afternoon. The card read “Thank you. I’m sorry. Love, Paul.” They were beautiful but she was sorry he had sent them. It just prolonged things for another day, but it was thoughtful of him. She sent him a text to thank him, and was relieved when he didn’t respond.

It took two weeks to stop thinking about him constantly, like giving up an addiction. The early days were the hardest. But by the time she’d been home for two weeks, Thanksgiving was only a week away, and she was busy getting ready for it, and Aden’s return. It was going to be their first Thanksgiving without Brad. It would just be the two of them. She had taken out their Thanksgiving decorations, and she wanted to set a