Turning Point Read online

  Turning Point 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 © 2019 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.

  Hardback ISBN 9780399179358

  Ebook ISBN 9780399179365

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Derek Walls

  Cover images: © Matteo Colombo/Getty Images (Champs-Elysées and Arc de Triomphe), © Mats Silvan/Getty Images (moving car at left)

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dedication

  By Danielle Steel

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Bill Browning had been on duty in the emergency room at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center for five hours and had just finished surgery on his third gunshot wound of the day. This one was going to make it, the first one had too, but the second patient had died, a sixteen-year-old victim of gang wars in San Francisco, and the drug trade the gangs engaged in. It was Christmas Day and business as usual at San Francisco General. They got the roughest cases in the city, brought in by ambulance, by the police, by paramedics, or by helicopter from highway accidents or any major disaster in the area. They were set up for multi-casualty incidents, in the jargon of the trade. San Francisco General was the best hospital in the area for severe trauma cases. It was a public institution with the benefit of private funding, in partnership with the Department of Public Health and the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. All the physicians who practiced there were UCSF faculty as well, which kept the standards high. It was a teaching hospital, and private donations had provided a new building that doubled the capacity of the trauma unit and the patients they could treat to three hundred. The old facility was still in use.

  The original building was notoriously grim. Almost every door in the hospital was locked with electronic access codes, and it wasn’t unheard of for injured victims from rival gangs to shoot each other in the emergency room once they were brought in, or pull guns on members of the staff and threaten them. There were metal detectors, but in spite of that, occasionally visitors were able to sneak weapons in. It was an added element at General that the medical personnel had to deal with, along with some of the worst emergencies and traumas in the city.

  The care of trauma victims was their strong suit, and Bill Browning was the head of the trauma unit. He signed up for duty in the ER for most major holidays, since he had nothing else to do. It was his gift to his colleagues, allowing others to be home with their families. Holidays meant nothing to him when he didn’t have his children with him. Now thirty-nine, Bill had specialized in trauma for his entire medical career. He was the senior doctor on staff on Christmas Day, and would be again on New Year’s Eve. He only got to have his daughters for Christmas every other year, and this was the off year.

  The nurses had decorated the emergency room and the visitors’ waiting room in the old facility with tinsel and assorted holiday decorations, which no one seemed to notice. Their patients were usually too severely injured, and their families too distressed, to care about the slightly forlorn evidence of the holiday scattered around the unit. Patients with the flu, food poisoning, bronchitis, or a sprained ankle ordinarily went to other hospitals. Only the most severe injuries, and a steady flow of the homeless population who were injured or ill and brought in by the police, went to SF General. The work was challenging for the medical staff, and a valuable learning experience for UCSF students. Bill Browning had seen just about everything that humans could inflict on themselves and each other during his career as an ER and trauma doctor. Nothing shocked him anymore. But it still saddened him to see the victims of the gangs. Their deaths were so senseless, such a waste, and evidence of young lives gone wrong. He had signed the death certificate of a sixteen-year-old boy only two hours earlier.

  He hadn’t stopped moving or sat down in the five hours he had been on duty, since ten that morning. It was a hell of a way to spend Christmas, but his two little girls, Philippa, called Pip, and Alexandra, Alex, were in London, where they lived with their mother. They were nine and seven years old. Their mother, Athena, was British. She had left San Francisco when Alex was three weeks old, the earliest date their pediatrician would allow her to travel so far with a newborn. Athena couldn’t wait to leave. The marriage had been dead long before that, although Bill had tried valiantly to hang on and convince her to keep trying, but their union had been doomed from the first.

  Since the divorce, he had plunged himself into his work more than ever, and didn’t see his girls nearly enough. He had them for a month in the summer, Christmas on alternate years, and whatever other time he could manage to fly to London for a few days. His ex-wife didn’t like sending the girls to San Francisco to see him. They’d been divorced for six years, she had remarried a British lord a year later, and now had two-year-old twin boys. Her second husband, Rupert, was exactly who she should have married in the first place. Her family referred to Bill as “The American,” and considered him her “youthful mistake.”

  Athena had been twenty-three when they met in New York. He’d been visiting his parents for a week during his residency. After medical school at Columbia, he’d done his internship and residency at Stanford, and stayed on in San Francisco afterward when he was offered a job at SF General. It wasn’t cushy or glorious, but it was the right place for the trauma work he wanted to do. He had no desire to return to New York. He enjoyed the weather and the outdoor sports he could pursue in San Francisco in his time off, hiking, windsurfing, sailing year round. And he particularly liked the hospital where he worked, and the kind of patients they treated.

  His parents were part of an elitist, snobbish social world that had always made him uncomfortable. He avoided it at all cost. While visiting them, under pressure he reluctantly agreed to join them at the party where he had met Athena. He was twenty-nine years old and dazzled by her. She was spectacularly beautiful, a little eccentric, outrageous, and a rebel. She had grown up in a sophisticated, glamorous, international jet-set world, and was visiting friends in New York.

  Bill had fallen head over heels in love with her, and she had come to San Francisco a month later, to pursue their torrid affair. She stayed. He was working long shifts in his residency, and whenever he wasn’t working, they spent most of their time in bed, or doing the sports he enjoyed and introduced to her. She thought their romance exciting and exotic. Bill was different from
any man she’d ever known. He was straightforward, honest, hardworking, and modest. She was wild, sexy, and a rare bird for him. She’d gotten pregnant with Pip six months later, and they flew to London over a long weekend to explain the situation to her parents. Bill proposed, which he wanted to do eventually anyway. It was just sooner than he’d planned. They were married in a discreet ceremony, and neither family was thrilled with their decision. Her family thought him too dull. His family thought her too racy.

  Pip was born six months later, and Bill bought a Victorian house in Noe Valley, where they could become a family and begin their life together. Her parents sent over a nanny from London so Athena didn’t have to be tied down, and she went home to England frequently to see her sisters, parents, and friends, and then returned to Bill, their baby, and their San Francisco life, a little less enthusiastically each time. She felt like a fish out of water in sleepy San Francisco.

  It had taken Athena all of five minutes to fall in love with Bill the night they met, and about a year to realize what she’d done, and how different they were. He was more of a detour than a destination in her life, and at the end of a year with him, she had begun to have serious doubts about the marriage. She was six months pregnant with Pip by then, and the baby brought them closer for a while. The life they shared was exactly what Bill wanted, a wife he loved and an adorable baby in a cozy little Victorian house in a family neighborhood. Athena was like an exotic bird trapped in a cage in a foreign land. It had taken her less than a year after Pip was born to fall out of love with him completely, and she got pregnant with Alex by accident after they got drunk at a party when Pip was fifteen months old. She spent most of the pregnancy commuting to London to see her old friends, and got increasingly depressed whenever she came back to Bill in San Francisco. His parents had never liked her, and were dismayed by what he’d gotten himself into, but he was still insisting that Athena would settle down and get used to married life. He had a long talk with her father, who suggested that Bill give up his career in medicine, move to England, and join him in the family shipping business if he wanted the marriage to work. Athena was never going to be a “California girl.” The only one who refused to see it was Bill. Three weeks after Alex was born, Athena took the two girls to England and spent the summer in the south of France with her sisters and friends at her parents’ summer home there. At the end of the summer she called to tell Bill she wasn’t coming back and wanted a divorce. He was devastated and tried to talk her out of it, but she was already seeing Rupert by then, and Bill didn’t have a chance. She and Rupert had had a summer fling in the south of France.

  She and Rupert had grown up together. He was one of her own, and a British lord like her father. Rupert was as much a libertine and free spirit as she was, and her three years in California were over. She never came back. Bill lived in the house in Noe Valley until the divorce she filed was final, hoping she would change her mind. She didn’t. Eventually he sold the pretty little house and moved to a small apartment on the Embarcadero, with a view of the bay and the Bay Bridge and a second bedroom for his girls when they would come to visit. The apartment was stark and barely furnished, and he was still living there five years later. He had never bothered to decorate it, except for the bare essentials from IKEA, including a pink bedroom set for the girls. The rest of the apartment looked as barren and empty as he felt.

  When his daughters visited him now in the summer, they traveled most of the time. He took them to Lake Tahoe, camping in Yosemite, they went on road trips, he took them to Disneyland, and did all the things divorced fathers do, trying desperately to establish a bond with his children in too little time. They were as British as their mother and stepfather, and loved their little half brothers. Bill tried to plant the seed of their going to college in the States one day, which Pip was mildly interested in, but it was still nine years away. In the meantime, he had his month with them in the summer, an occasional weekend when he could fly to London to see them, and Christmas every other year. The rest of the time he had his work. He firmly believed that he didn’t need more than that. There hadn’t been an important woman in his life since Athena, and he was beginning to see now how unsuited they had been for each other. He told himself it no longer mattered, and insisted he wasn’t bitter about the divorce. He hadn’t been in love with her for several years. She had broken his heart when she left with their daughters. The loves of his life now were Pip and Alex. He readily admitted he was a workaholic, and saw no harm in that.

  The absence of a wife or girlfriend gave Bill more time to devote to his work, and to his children when he saw them. He didn’t want anyone interfering with his relationship with them, and a new woman might. He saw very little of his brother and parents in New York. They were part of a world he had never liked and had shunned since he’d entered medical school. His brother was an antitrust lawyer with political aspirations, married to an environmental attorney, involved in a multitude of causes. They had a booming social life. His parents were part of the old New York establishment, which had never interested him. He was happy with his much smaller life in San Francisco, spending time between the hospital where he worked and the outdoors. It was a choice he had made when he was young, and it still suited him.

  He had hated people knowing who his family was when he was growing up, and he still didn’t like it. His brother thrived on flaunting the family name and connections. They were very different men. Their parents regarded Bill as an outcast and renegade of sorts. His humble life and work mystified them. He could have had an illustrious career in medicine in New York, but he never wanted that. Caring for derelicts and patients with gunshot wounds that he saw almost daily in the trauma unit at SF General was exactly what he wanted to do. His family name meant nothing in the world he worked in, in San Francisco, and that suited him too. He had become something of a loner since the divorce. New nurses and female residents were always startled by how good-looking he was, but he paid no attention to them while on duty or off. He was all about his work and his two daughters. No one knew anything about his personal life, which was just what he wanted.

  His romantic life had been sparse and sporadic since the divorce. There was the occasional superficial date, and nothing more. His one regret was that his parents barely knew his daughters. Athena had seen to that, and his parents had made no effort either. Their dislike for their ex-daughter-in-law had carried over to the children. They had tea with the girls in London, when they traveled, if they had time. But more often than not, they found making time to see the children inconvenient, or Athena made it difficult. Planning with her was never easy. She was as vague and unreliable as she had always been, so Pip and Alex had no real attachment to their American grandparents, only to their father, whom they saw too little of but enjoyed when they did. He called them several times a week, and tried to stay abreast of what they were doing. It wasn’t easy maintaining a fully engaged relationship with children six thousand miles away. As girls from good families did in England, Pip would be going to boarding school in two years. She could hardly wait. Time and distance were not on Bill’s side, and he did all he could to compensate for that. Whenever possible with his busy schedule, he flew to London for a long weekend to visit them. Although nowadays they were often occupied with their friends and finding the right time for them was getting harder every year.

  * * *

  —

  Things got busier in the ER as the day wore on. Bill sent a heart attack to coronary ICU, an old man from the Tenderloin brought in by paramedics. He sent a homeless recent amputee, a drug addict with a fierce wound infection, to the surgical ward to be evaluated by the attending surgeon, and he moved a child suspected of meningitis to the pediatric ICU for a spinal tap. He called in a neurosurgeon for a woman in a coma from a brain injury she had sustained in a car accident. It was all in a day’s work. He went from one exam room to the next, and stopped to chat with an elderly woman who had fallen
down the stairs and was more shaken up than injured. Miraculously, she hadn’t broken a hip, and he was warm and reassuring with her. The hospital had a fantastic elder care unit, the best in the city, and he referred patients there regularly. He had a kind, easy bedside manner that appeared casual to the patients, but wasn’t, as he evaluated them carefully, looking for symptoms of hidden problems in addition to the obvious ones they had. The nurses all admired and respected him. He treated every patient with the utmost care and attention, no matter who they were. Unlike a lot of doctors, he didn’t show off or have a big ego. He was a genuinely nice guy.

  “Wowza…who’s the handsome prince on duty today?” a relief nurse filling in on the holiday asked one of the regular nurses as Bill left an exam room and moved on to the next one. He had dark hair and warm chocolate-brown eyes, and looked athletic in the hospital scrubs he wore. His smile, as he talked to the ninety-year-old woman who had fallen, lit up the room. The relief nurse had been observing him closely, and commented afterward that he was a hunk.

  “He’s the head of trauma. He always works on holidays,” the regular ER nurse told her. “Don’t get too excited. I’ve worked here for ten years, and I’ve never heard of him dating anyone at work. He’s a serious guy.”

  “Married?” the relief nurse quizzed her. He was too attractive to dismiss lightly.

  “Divorced, I think. He must be to work the hours he does. He’s just another workaholic. You have to be, around here. I think he has kids somewhere far away, Australia, New Zealand. I forget. That’s why he works holidays.”

  “That means no girlfriend either,” the nurse said hopefully.