Resurrection, p.1
Resurrection, page 1
By Danielle Steel
RESURRECTION • ONLY THE BRAVE • NEVER TOO LATE • UPSIDE DOWN • THE BALL AT VERSAILLES • SECOND ACT • HAPPINESS • PALAZZO • THE WEDDING PLANNER • WORTHY OPPONENTS • WITHOUT A TRACE • THE WHITTIERS • THE HIGH NOTES • THE CHALLENGE • SUSPECTS • BEAUTIFUL • HIGH STAKES • INVISIBLE • FLYING ANGELS • THE BUTLER • COMPLICATIONS • NINE LIVES • FINDING ASHLEY • THE AFFAIR • NEIGHBORS • ALL THAT GLITTERS • ROYAL • DADDY’S GIRLS • THE WEDDING DRESS • THE NUMBERS GAME • MORAL COMPASS • SPY • CHILD’S PLAY • THE DARK SIDE • LOST AND FOUND • BLESSING IN DISGUISE • SILENT NIGHT • TURNING POINT • BEAUCHAMP HALL • IN HIS FATHER’S FOOTSTEPS • THE GOOD FIGHT • THE CAST • ACCIDENTAL HEROES • FALL FROM GRACE • PAST PERFECT • FAIRYTALE • THE RIGHT TIME • THE DUCHESS • AGAINST ALL ODDS • DANGEROUS GAMES • THE MISTRESS • THE AWARD • RUSHING WATERS • MAGIC • THE APARTMENT • PROPERTY OF A NOBLEWOMAN • BLUE • PRECIOUS GIFTS • UNDERCOVER • COUNTRY • PRODIGAL SON • PEGASUS • A PERFECT LIFE • POWER PLAY • WINNERS • FIRST SIGHT • UNTIL THE END OF TIME • THE SINS OF THE MOTHER • FRIENDS FOREVER • BETRAYAL • HOTEL VENDÔME • HAPPY BIRTHDAY • 44 CHARLES STREET • LEGACY • FAMILY TIES • BIG GIRL • SOUTHERN LIGHTS • MATTERS OF THE HEART • ONE DAY AT A TIME • A GOOD WOMAN • ROGUE • HONOR THYSELF • AMAZING GRACE • BUNGALOW 2 • SISTERS • H.R.H. • COMING OUT • THE HOUSE • TOXIC BACHELORS • MIRACLE • IMPOSSIBLE • ECHOES • SECOND CHANCE • RANSOM • SAFE HARBOUR • JOHNNY ANGEL • DATING GAME • ANSWERED PRAYERS • SUNSET IN ST. TROPEZ • THE COTTAGE • THE KISS • LEAP OF FAITH • LONE EAGLE • JOURNEY • THE HOUSE ON HOPE STREET • THE WEDDING • IRRESISTIBLE FORCES • GRANNY DAN • BITTERSWEET • MIRROR IMAGE • THE KLONE AND I • THE LONG ROAD HOME • THE GHOST • SPECIAL DELIVERY • THE RANCH • SILENT HONOR • MALICE • FIVE DAYS IN PARIS • LIGHTNING • WINGS • THE GIFT • ACCIDENT • VANISHED • MIXED BLESSINGS • JEWELS • NO GREATER LOVE • HEARTBEAT • MESSAGE FROM NAM • DADDY • STAR • ZOYA • KALEIDOSCOPE • FINE THINGS • WANDERLUST • SECRETS • FAMILY ALBUM • FULL CIRCLE • CHANGES • THURSTON HOUSE • CROSSINGS • ONCE IN A LIFETIME • A PERFECT STRANGER • REMEMBRANCE • PALOMINO • LOVE: POEMS • THE RING • LOVING • TO LOVE AGAIN • SUMMER’S END • SEASON OF PASSION • THE PROMISE • NOW AND FOREVER • PASSION’S PROMISE • GOING HOME
Nonfiction
EXPECT A MIRACLE: Quotations to Live and Love By
PURE JOY: The Dogs We Love
A GIFT OF HOPE: Helping the Homeless
HIS BRIGHT LIGHT: The Story of Nick Traina
For Children
PRETTY MINNIE IN PARIS
PRETTY MINNIE IN HOLLYWOOD
Resurrection is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Danielle Steel
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the DP colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780593498460
Ebook ISBN 9780593498477
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design: Eileen Carey
Cover images: © Nature Peaceful/Shutterstock (sky), © Joanna Czogala/Arcangel (Eiffel Tower), © virginie perocheau/plainpicture (street)
ep_prh_7.0_147409718_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
By Danielle Steel
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
About the Author
_147409718_
To my beloved children,
Beatrix, Trevor, Todd,
Nick, Sam, Victoria,
Vanessa, Maxx, and Zara,
so greatly loved!
May you be safe and blessed,
strong and whole,
and cherished by those
who love you.
May they love you
as much as I do!
With all my love,
Mom / d.s.
Chapter 1
Darcy Gray always put the finishing touches on her blog, The Gray Zone, on Sunday nights, after she’d let it sit for a few days. She liked to take a last look. She posted it on Mondays, and enhanced it with daily posts on Instagram to introduce additional ideas and products she supported. She had started her blog for fun, thirteen years ago, at twenty-nine, when her fraternal twin daughters Zoe and Penny had started kindergarten. It had been the perfect activity for a full-time, hands-on, at-home mom. She had introduced it before blogs were commonplace, and she used it to share her views about upcoming fashions and trends, her opinions on a variety of subjects, research on new health and scientific information. She treated it like a letter to friends. It had gone viral almost immediately, and for more than a decade she had been one of the most respected bloggers and influencers in the country, and even around the world. Her readers trusted her. Her opinion was sought by magazine editors, companies, and trendsetters of all kinds.
In the years since Darcy began writing The Gray Zone, influencers had become a powerful force in the world of promotion and communications. Companies and major brands sought the attention of major influencers to endorse their products and paid as much as twenty-five thousand dollars for a single post, which could add up to a multimillion-dollar business for a blogger like Darcy, one of the most respected in the business. It was a highly desirable job now.
Darcy was sought after for her authenticity—she never wore, used, or recommended a brand or product she didn’t believe in, and her followers had total faith in her. She never let them down or led them astray for her own gain. Blogging and influencing had become a new way for companies to engage directly with individuals and communities on a personal level to promote their products. Darcy had been among the first to catch that wave to success. Her sincerity, good taste, and good judgment shone through every word.
As the only daughter of the head of a distinguished publishing house in New York, and her mother an editor, Darcy had always wanted to write. She just didn’t know what until she started The Gray Zone.
Because of her parents’ involvement in publishing, they had always pushed her in that direction. They were convinced that she had talent as a writer and encouraged literary ambitions at a lofty level. They hoped she would be an important novelist one day and tried to instill that desire in her. She had been an English literature major at Princeton, which had been her parents’ wish for her. It was her father’s alma mater.
Since her parents had been unable to have children for the first twenty years of their marriage, Darcy had been a late, happy surprise. Her father had hoped for a son to follow in his footsteps at Princeton, and into the literary world. Instead, Darcy had agreed to go to Princeton when she was accepted, but she had her sights set on modern pursuits, and her writing aspirations went no further than the internet while she was in college.
The disadvantage she found in having older parents—her mother was forty-six when she was born, and her father ten years older—was that they were overprotective, and old-school in all their views of the world. Both from New York families, venerable and distinguished but with diminished funds, they wanted Darcy to live in their own familiar world, but she was of an entirely different generation and mindset, she was an independent, free-thinking young woman, and her parents’ lofty literary world held no appeal for her. It seemed like a relic of the past.
In their dreams for Darcy, they imagined her following a path similar to their own, working for ten years as a writer or editor in publishing and marrying someone like them one day, with the same goals and interests. Instead, Darcy had met Charles Gray in her junior year at Princeton, through a mutual friend. Ten years older than she, not long out of Columbia Business School, Charlie was following his own unusual dreams, and was determined to make his mark in the world of retail fashion, where he could see there were fortunes to be made. His ideas were exciting and made sense to Darcy. She hadn’t found her own career path yet, but she was sure that he would go far with the plans he explained to her. She loved how modern and ambitious he was.
They had in common the fact that they were both only children of older parents who had set ideas for them. Charlie’s parents were originally from Boston. His father was in banking, and his mother had never worked. His parents couldn’t understand his fascination with the world of retail and would have preferred to see him go into banking like his father. Charlie wanted to own department stores, which made no sense to his parents.
Both se ts of parents felt strongly that Darcy and Charles should seek solid jobs working for other people, for salaries they could count on, that their romance could simmer for a decade, and that they should not rush into anything.
Youth won out in the end. Charlie proposed to Darcy the Christmas of her senior year, and despite their parents’ reservations, they were married in June. Their parents were shocked even further when Darcy got pregnant on their honeymoon, with the twins. In their parents’ opinion, they were moving with lightning speed, without careful planning.
The other thing Darcy and Charlie had in common was that they both had parents who were old-fashioned in their views of marriage. They were of a generation that was reserved, as their own parents had been and had modeled for them. They showed little emotion to each other, or even to the children they loved. Charlie and Darcy were excited by each other’s bright minds, and his visions for the future, but at first they were more comfortable talking business than showing overt signs of affection. They had no role models for an affectionate, playful marriage. It was a meeting of the minds and both of them had been shy for a long time about being open with their feelings. It was their daughters who warmed them up eventually and taught them to love more openly. Both Charlie and Darcy recognized that their similar upbringing hadn’t served them well in teaching them to have a loving, demonstrative relationship. It was unfamiliar to them. They loved each other deeply but didn’t show it easily.
It came as no surprise to Charlie or Darcy when they lost both sets of their parents within the first decade of their marriage, in a period of two years. Darcy’s mother was seventy-seven and died of a heart attack in her sleep. Her father, at eighty-seven, had a stroke months later and had been in frail health for several years. Both of Charlie’s parents had died of cancer at seventy-five and eighty, and his father had had severe Alzheimer’s. It left the twins without grandparents, and had been a hard, sad two years as the grandparents died in rapid succession one after the other. Charlie and Darcy supported each other through it. Their parents’ final years hadn’t been easy, for them or their children. It made Darcy grateful that she and Charlie had had their own children when they were at a much earlier age, and were young parents. With nineteen-year-old daughters in college, they were younger now than their parents had been when they were born. Darcy and Charlie still had years ahead of them to have fun and enjoy their lives and pursue their careers, which they both thoroughly enjoyed.
Thirteen years after she started The Gray Zone, at forty-two, with a husband and twin daughters, and over a million followers, Darcy still loved doing it. She had a widely heard voice on many subjects, not just fashion. She was invited to exciting events all over the world and had an extremely lucrative business. Both her fraternal twin daughters had started college a year early, at Boston University, and were juniors now at nineteen, and were studying abroad for a year. Penny, a tall, lanky dark-haired beauty with blue eyes, who closely resembled her equally striking mother, was studying at the University of Hong Kong. She was an econ major, with a minor in fashion merchandising, and wanted to work for her father at his flagship department store in New York, one of his four stores, when she graduated. She had a calm, quiet, sensible nature. Penny had studied Mandarin in high school and college, and was speaking fairly fluent Cantonese now, after five months in Hong Kong, since September. She felt that speaking Chinese would be useful in business, and for working with the factories her father dealt with for their exclusive lines at the stores. She was living in a luxurious apartment her parents had rented for her in The Peak section of the city, with three female roommates. Unlike their own parents, Charlie and Darcy were supportive of their daughters’ ambitions and dreams.
Zoe, Penny’s younger twin by seven minutes, was as different from her sister in looks as she was in personality. Petite, with an elfin air about her, she had long straight blond hair, big green eyes, and looked like her father and his side of the family. Her father, Charles Gray, was tall, and as blond as Zoe was. She looked like her paternal grandmother. Zoe had a fiery personality and took any difference in opinion from her own as a personal affront. She got along better with her father than with her mother most of the time, but not always. She was studying art history at the Sorbonne in Paris and had a particular interest in the Impressionists. Her dream was to get a job as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Darcy was on the board of the Met’s Costume Institute, and Charlie was on the board of MoMA, so the family was well connected in the art world.
Zoe had fallen in love with a young medical student almost as soon as she got to Paris in September. Jean-Paul Thibaut, twenty-six years old and the adored only son of two doctors, was studying at the Faculté de Médecine. He was staying at Zoe’s tiny, quaint Left Bank apartment most of the time in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area in the 6th arrondissement. She had found it on the internet herself, and was now speaking fairly decent French, thanks to Jean-Paul.
Charles and Darcy had met Jean-Paul during one of their visits to Paris and liked him, but hoped the relationship didn’t get too serious too quickly. They wanted Zoe to come back to the States for her senior year, like her sister, Penny, and graduate from B.U. Zoe was already talking about taking graduate classes in France after her senior year. She had a mind of her own, and was much less compliant than Penny, who was having fun with her three roommates in Hong Kong, and more intent on her studies than on romance, which was typical of her. Zoe took life by the horns, and lived it fully, even at nineteen. Penny was more cautious.
* * *
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After marrying Charles as soon as she’d graduated from Princeton and getting pregnant with the twins immediately, once they were born they kept Darcy too busy to even think about a job for the first few years, and Charlie was content to have her stay at home to take care of their babies, while he built his retail empire. Then she started the blog, which filled her time, eventually brought its own rich rewards, and allowed her to be a full-time mother until the twins left for college. Darcy had never wanted another job. Writing The Gray Zone suited her perfectly, although it had been a mystery to her parents for several years. But Charlie had encouraged her to write it. As a major influencer, she had an enviable position now. Her previews about fashion and all the information she shared in the blog were well chosen and well informed.
When they had first married, Charlie, with an MBA from Columbia, had turned a modest amount of inherited family money from his grandparents into a booming success in retail. Twenty-five years before, while still in business school, he had realized that there was big money to be made in fashion and had bought a small failing department store in downtown New York with a group of investors he’d gone to business school with, and as they branched out into other investments, and once he could afford it, he had bought them out. An important group of Hong Kong investors had subsequently helped him build a highly lucrative chain of four high-end luxury department stores in New York, Chicago, L.A., and Dallas. He ran them all from his home base in New York, with “Gray’s” in New York as their flagship store.
Gray’s Department Store had a reasonable online business, but the real appeal for its customers was the brick-and-mortar experience and excitement of visiting the stores. They were magnificently merchandised with extremely profitable results. They made many of their own exclusive items, some fabricated in China for bigger margins, and others in Italy, especially their high-quality, high-style leather goods. If you wanted gorgeous bags and shoes and accessories, you went to Gray’s. They bought high-priced luxury lines in Paris and carried all the most important American and foreign designers of the day.
Charlie’s success had allowed him to buy a handsome townhouse in the East Eighties early in their marriage, and the house in Southampton shortly after, put his daughters through the best private schools in New York and one of the best colleges, and lead a very comfortable life. Charlie and Darcy were invited to every major social, charity, and fashion event in New York. They were important people to know.
