Nine Lives - Danielle Steel Page 0,8
wanted to go through this again. She had nightmares every night, dreaming either of her father or her brother crashing in their planes.
She finally started looking for another job, when Harry hired a woman to take care of Emma in the daytime. She thought of looking for a job in a museum or an art gallery, but instead wound up working as a receptionist for an accounting firm. It wasn’t an exciting job, but it was the best offer she had at the time, with a good company that had a fine reputation. The pay was fair and they let her do some minor bookkeeping. She told herself she’d find a better job later. She didn’t intend to stay there forever, just for a while to get back in the workforce. It was a gentle way to start again after the trauma she’d been through. She liked the people when she interviewed. They all seemed straightforward and friendly and had integrity. It was privately owned by an older man, and run by his son, Brad Mackenzie, who was thirty-three years old and would inherit the business one day. They were considerate and kind. They knew she’d lost her brother and had been nursing her mother, and were compassionate about it.
Two months after she started working there, Brad asked Maggie out, and she hesitated. She didn’t think it was a good idea to date the boss’s son. If it turned out badly she could get fired or have to quit. It seemed too risky, but he was so nice to her and so insistent that she finally succumbed, and they started dating. Even in her diminished state, her mother said Brad was perfect. The Mackenzies were a solid family and Brad was their only son. He had gone to Northwestern, played football in college, loved baseball, went to Stanford Business School for an MBA, then came home to run the family business and enjoyed it. He and his father got along well, and Brad told her repeatedly how much he had learned from his father. He was an all-around wholesome, decent guy.
A year after they started dating, he proposed, and they got engaged. She couldn’t think of a single reason not to. He was the kind of man every parent wanted for their daughter. He wasn’t exciting, but he was someone you could count on. And in a quiet, gentle way, she loved him. It wasn’t a wild, passionate love, but she could see growing old with him. Their life wasn’t thrilling, but it was predictable and solid, and having lost a father and a brother, with a mother slipping away quietly, he was a rock she could hang on to, which was important to her. She had no family left, except a mother with dementia.
She was twenty-nine when they married. They bought a home in Lake Forest, and she got pregnant almost immediately. Their son, Aden, was born when Maggie was thirty and Brad thirty-five, and they were the perfect suburban American family, the poster children for a happy life. Maggie’s mother died shortly after Aden was born, which wasn’t unexpected, and was a release from the grief that had drowned her. Maggie was glad she had at least seen the baby, although she thought he was Tommy, and didn’t really understand by then. There was nothing left of the woman she had been before Kevin died, when Maggie was a child. The hard blows and the losses in her life had destroyed her.
Maggie had stopped working for Brad full-time when the baby was born, and helped him out two days a week when Aden started kindergarten. She liked working in the office with him. He had inherited the business by then, it was doing better than ever, and Brad was proud to own and run it.
He and Maggie were happy, more than she had ever expected to be. She had always thought she would marry a man like her father, handsome and rakish, daring and brave. Brad was an attractive man, but he had none of the wild impulses of her father or brother. He was what she had wanted, a man who was never going to surprise her or frighten her with a roller coaster ride through life. She didn’t want that. She loved knowing that their life would continue on the same reliable path forever. She needed that now. Brad and Aden were all she had.
Her only worry was that Aden had the Kelly