Nine Lives

by Danielle Steel

  Nine Lives 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 © 2021 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 and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Steel, Danielle, author.

  Title: Nine lives : a novel / Danielle Steel.

  Description: New York : Delacorte Press, [2021] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020012001 (print) | LCCN 2020012002 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984821430 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984821447 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3569.T33828 N56 2021 (print) | LCC PS3569.T33828 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012001

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012002

  Ebook ISBN 9781984821447

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Derek Walls

  Cover photo: © peepo/Getty Images

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Dedication

  By Danielle Steel

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Mary Margaret Kelly, Maggie, had lived on four military bases by the time she was eight years old. It was the only life she knew, and she liked it. Her father, Kevin, was an Air Force test pilot, and had been decorated for the missions he flew in Vietnam. Her paternal grandfather had been a Navy pilot in World War II.

  Maggie worshipped her father. He was handsome and tall and funny. She loved watching him fly planes, although she knew it scared her mother. Nothing scared her father. He was very brave, and he always told Maggie to be brave too. She tried to be. Her brother, Tommy, also tried to be. He said he was going to be a pilot one day like their dad. Maggie was five years older than Tommy, and she helped her mom take care of him when she was busy. Emma was a nurse before Maggie was born, but she stayed home with the kids now, and she always had a lot to do. The Air Force gave them a good life. Her father was a squadron leader and flew training missions. They moved to a new base in Nevada when Maggie turned nine. Her mom didn’t like it. It was hot most of the time, except at night, and she said that their dad’s missions were going to be more dangerous now, but she didn’t say why. Maggie heard them arguing about it sometimes. But her dad loved what he did. His eyes and his whole face lit up whenever he talked about flying. He loved everything about planes.

  They’d only been there for three months when Maggie’s dad went out on a routine training mission. He kissed Maggie in her bed early that morning before he left. He kissed Tommy, who was sound asleep. Emma got up and watched him from the kitchen window while he drove away. By the time Tommy and Maggie were having breakfast, two men in uniform knocked on the door, came in, and sat in the living room with their mother. Emma didn’t make a sound. She just sat there, sobbing quietly, so her children couldn’t hear her. After a while the men left.

  She told Maggie and Tommy afterwards that their dad had died. She said his plane had malfunctioned and spun out of control. The officers told Emma that if Kevin Kelly hadn’t been able to stop it, no one could have.

  Three days later, Maggie and Tommy went to their father’s funeral. Years later, Maggie could still remember how terrible she had felt, and how impossible it was to believe that her dad would never come home again. The men in his squadron had folded the flag on his casket and handed it to her mother, who had clutched it to her chest with her eyes closed. Maggie had thought she would faint, but she didn’t. Maggie kept telling herself to be brave the way her father had told her to be. And she was, braver than she ever thought she could be. She took care of Tommy when her mother stayed in bed and cried all the time after that. Emma hardly ever got up, and Maggie cooked dinner for them.

  They went to stay with Emma’s parents in Oklahoma for a while, then they came back and moved off the base to Las Vegas. It was the first time Maggie had lived among civilians and gone to a local school. Emma got a job as a cashier in a casino. She didn’t want to go back to nursing, she said it had been too long. They stayed in Las Vegas for six months, living on her salary and their dad’s pension. After that, they moved to three different states, and finally made their way to Miami, where Emma got a better job at a resort hotel, working as a manicurist in the spa. She lived a quiet life, and never went out on dates, until she met Harry Sherman.

  Maggie was fourteen and her father had been dead for five years when Emma met Harry at the resort in Miami where they both worked. He was the catering manager. He wasn’t handsome like Maggie’s father. He wasn’t exciting. He wasn’t a hero and didn’t fly planes, but Maggie’s mother told her that wasn’t important. What they needed was a man who wasn’t going to risk his life every day when he went to work. She told Maggie that if her father hadn’t been in love with the thrill of flying planes, he’d be alive today. He could have been anything. A carpenter, a plumber, a teacher, a contractor, but instead he loved danger. Every time Tommy said he wanted to fly planes too when he grew up, Emma told him, in a harsh voice, that he’d better think of something else to do if he didn’t want to kill himself. They learned not to talk about their father, or flying.

  Harry was a decent man. He was quiet, serious, he didn’t laugh or tell funny stories like their dad, and he didn’t talk to her or Tommy much. But their mom said he had a good job. They moved into an apartment together a year after they met. Their mom told them that she and Harry were engaged. They got married a month later.

  Maggie was fifteen when they got married at city hall. The four of them had lunch at a restaurant afterwards. Harry went to work as usual that night, there was a big convention in town. He was nice enough to them, and Maggie didn’t mind him. He had no children of his own, and he tried to be a father to them, but he always worked until late at night, running the catering side of the conventions at the hotel. Emma seemed happy with him, but her eyes never lit up the way they had when she heard Kevin drive up or when he walked into the room. Her life with Harry was different. They both worked hard, and Maggie and Tommy were home alone a lot of the time until their mom came home from work. Sometimes Maggie had cooked dinner for herself and Tommy by then. They weren’t a family the way they had been when their father was alive. They didn’t do things together or have fun, they just lived in the same house. And they knew Harry would come home from work every night. Nothing he did was dangerous, and in time, the look of panic left her mother’s eyes. Harry wasn’t glamorous or exciting, but he was reliable.

  Harry sat in front of the TV when he came home at night and drank a few beers. He stayed up late, and w
as still asleep when they left for school in the morning. He never had anything to say to them anyway. He told Emma he wasn’t used to kids. Once a week, he would give Maggie a crisp twenty-dollar bill, and tell her to go to a movie with her friends, or buy something. He bought Tommy a football once, but didn’t have time to play with him. The weekly twenty-dollar bill was the only real contact Maggie had with him. Her mother seemed like a different person now, as though something inside her had died when their father did.

  When Maggie was sixteen and Tommy eleven, a year after Emma and Harry got married, Harry was transferred to a bigger hotel in Chicago that was part of the same chain. It was a better job, with more money and more responsibility. Emma wasn’t happy about it. She said they’d never see him. He’d be working all the time. They moved anyway, and got a nicer apartment than the one they’d had in Miami. Maggie missed Florida and her friends every day. The school she went to in Chicago was much bigger than her high school in Miami. Tommy went to a different school, a few blocks from hers, and he didn’t like it either.

  Emma wanted to move to the suburbs, but Harry said he needed to live close to work. They had offered her a job in the hotel gift shop, and sometimes she snuck downstairs to visit Harry. They had been together for two years by then, and Maggie thought they seemed like strangers with each other. She tried to ask her mother about it sometimes, and Emma said she liked their life because it was safe. She said that was all she wanted now. She had put away all the pictures of Kevin, but Maggie had kept two of them in a drawer in her desk, where she could see them anytime, and she’d given Tommy one of their father in his flight uniform.

  Harry looked like a fat little old man compared to their father. Kevin had been tall and lean, with a smile that wouldn’t quit. Emma was thirty-two years old when he died, thirty-seven when she met Harry, and thirty-nine now. Maggie had friends with mothers that age and older, and they still seemed young and full of life. Emma looked like an old woman. Harry had just turned fifty and seemed even older. Maggie had thought her father was so glamorous, and her mother had been pretty when he was alive, but she wasn’t anymore. She didn’t seem to care, and Harry didn’t either. He was a devoted husband, responsible, and accepted her as she was. She talked about going back to nursing sometimes but it had been too many years and the hours were too long, so she took menial jobs instead.

  Maggie dreamed of going back to Florida when she finished high school. She missed the warm weather and the friends she’d made there. Moving to another town as a civilian wasn’t like moving to another base in the Air Force. In the military there were always people to welcome you and make you feel at home. In civilian life, no one made it easier for you. You had to figure it out on your own, and meet new friends in a new school. And most of the girls were mean.

  When Maggie turned seventeen after they moved to Chicago and started her senior year in high school, she ate lunch alone in the cafeteria every day. She hadn’t made it into the clique of popular girls, and didn’t want to. None of the boys noticed her. She didn’t care about them either. Her grades were okay, but she didn’t like her new school. She hardly knew her teachers. They’d never tried to get to know her. She was planning to go to a state college when she graduated, and didn’t know what she wanted to study yet. Her mother had gotten her a summer job as a waitress at the hotel. She hated it, but she had no idea what else to do. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to go to college, but her mother said that her father would have expected it of her, so she felt she had no choice.

  Maggie was leaving school one day, when someone flashed past her. She could feel the wind rush by her face. He would have knocked her down if he’d come any closer, but he was careful not to. She wasn’t even sure who or what it was. When she turned around and looked, it was a boy on a skateboard, moving at full speed. He glanced back and waved at her. She hadn’t seen a smile as dazzling as that since her father. He was tall like Kevin too, with sandy blond hair, and she thought he had blue eyes when he looked back at her. He was wearing a knit cap pulled down in the chilly autumn breeze. She was going to yell at him to watch out when he flew past her, but she didn’t have time to. He was still smiling as he went around the corner and disappeared. He had frightened her for a minute, and then she went to meet Tommy at their bus stop to go home, and she forgot about the boy on the skateboard. She saw him again a few days later, on his way to school. He got off the board and carried it the last block to school, and came up alongside her.

  “You’re not supposed to skate on the sidewalk,” she scolded him.

  “I don’t. I was just saying hi to you,” he said with that enormous smile that started in his eyes and transformed his whole face. He had bright blue eyes and an aura of boyish innocence.

  “You almost knocked me down.” She frowned. She didn’t know what else to say to him. She hadn’t dated any boys yet. The girls in her class were much cooler than she was. She was an innocent compared to them. At seventeen she’d only kissed a boy once. He’d been drunk at a school dance and she’d run away from him. He scared her.

  “I didn’t almost knock you down,” the boy said clearly. “I wouldn’t do that. I’ve been watching you. Are you new at school?” He was curious about her and seemed more confident than she was. Her palms were sweating while she talked to him and tried to look indifferent.

  “I was, last year. We moved here in April, from Miami.”

  He whistled. “Wow. Big change. The weather, if nothing else.”

  “The school too,” she admitted. He had noticed her keeping to herself, away from the other girls. It was a big school, and not easy to make friends.

  “Why Chicago?” he asked her.

  “My stepfather got a job here, so we had to move.”

  “My parents are divorced too,” he commiserated. “It sucks sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  “My father died eight years ago. My mom remarried when I was fifteen,” she said in a soft voice.

  “I’m sorry. That’s tough. Cancer?” he asked cautiously.

  “He was a test pilot in the Air Force,” she said proudly. “And a fighter pilot in Vietnam. His plane malfunctioned, and it crashed. It was fun when he was alive. We moved around a lot. It’s different in civilian life, and not so fun.” She looked into his eyes as he held the door open for her and they walked into school together. He had said he was a senior too. There were a thousand kids in their class, which made it even harder to meet people, and she was shy. She’d gone to a lot of different schools until they moved to Miami, but she still hadn’t gotten used to it. Being the new girl was hard. She thought civilian kids were much snootier than military kids, especially the girls. In the military, your status depended on your father’s rank. Here, it was about a lot of other things: where you lived, what you wore, what kind of car your father drove, your parents’ jobs. She didn’t have any of the obvious status symbols the other girls did, which might have impressed them, so she didn’t try.

  “Your father sounds cool. I want to learn to hang glide when I finish school,” he said with a grin.

  “Do you want to be a pilot?” Her eyes lit up when she asked him. It was familiar ground for her. Finally.

  “I want to be a lot of things. I want to race motorcycles. I’ve got a friend who lets me ride his on weekends.”

  “That’s dangerous,” she commented.

  “So is everything worth doing. I want to jump out of an airplane and see what that feels like,” he said, smiling at her, and then looked at her regretfully. “I have a class in five minutes. Econ. I suck at it.”

  “Me too,” she admitted with a grin. “I like history, and Spanish.”

  “I hate school,” he said, and lately she wondered if she did too. Her school in Miami had been smaller and easier to navigate, and she’d learned Spanish from her Hispanic classmates. No one spoke Spanish here. “Well, see ya,” he said, and stopped at his locker to put hi
s skateboard away. She walked past him to her locker at the far end of another hallway. It had been nice talking to him for a few minutes.

  She didn’t see him again for several days, and then he caught up to her leaving school on a Friday. She was hurrying, afraid to be late to meet Tommy at the bus stop.

  “Want to see me race tomorrow?” he asked her. “My friend let me enter his motorcycle in a race. I just turned eighteen, so I have a license.” She thought about it and decided she did want to see him race. It sounded exciting. She didn’t know what her mother would say. She probably wouldn’t like it, but Maggie wasn’t going to ask her. Her mom didn’t have to know everything she did. She’d have to find someone to leave Tommy with. She watched him for her mom on Saturdays, while her mother worked at the hotel gift shop. They had promoted her to manager.

  “I babysit my brother. If I can find someone to keep him, I’ll come. Where is it?” He told her. It was on an old track, a long bus ride from where she lived, but she was intrigued by him now. She realized she still didn’t know his name.

  “Bring your brother with you. How old is he?”

  “He’s twelve. He’d probably tell my mother, but he’d love to see the race too.”

  “Well, bring him if you want.”

  “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. My parents got divorced when I was two. They fight whenever they see each other. I live with my mom. My father works on boats, all over the place. I don’t see him much.” She nodded. They each had their own heartbreaks to deal with. “What’s your name?” he asked her then.

  “Maggie Kelly.”

  “Paul Gilmore,” he said, and they smiled at each other.

  “I’ll try to make it to your race,” she promised, not sure if she could do it, and then ran to meet her brother before it got any later.