Danielle Steel: Rogue

Her intercom buzzer rang as she was saying goodbye to Blake. Her four o'clock patient, the fifteen-year-old boy, had arrived. She hung up, and opened the door to her office, as her patient wandered in. He sat down in one of the two big easy chairs before he looked at her directly and said hello.

“Hi, Ted,” she said comfortably. “How's it going?” He shrugged, as she closed the door and their session began. He had tried to hang himself twice. She had hospitalized him for three months, and he was doing better after two weeks at home. He had begun showing signs of being bipolar when he was thirteen. She was seeing him three times a week, and once a week he went to a group for previously suicidal teens. He was doing well, and Maxine had a good relationship with him. Her patients liked her a lot. She had a great way with them. And she cared about them deeply. She was a good doctor and good person.

The session lasted fifty minutes, after which she had a ten-minute break, managed to return two phone calls, and started her last session of the day with a sixteen-year-old anorexic girl. As usual, it was a long, hard, interesting day, that required a lot of concentration. Afterward, she managed to return the rest of her calls, and by sixthirty she was walking home in the rain, thinking about Blake. She was glad that he'd be coming for Thanksgiving, and she knew their children would be thrilled. She wondered if that meant he wouldn't be coming to see them for Christmas. If anything, he'd probably want them to meet him in Aspen. He usually ended the year there. With all his interesting options and houses, it was hard to know where he'd be at any given time. And now, with Morocco added to the list, it would be even harder to track or pin him down. She didn't hold it against him, it was just the way he was, even if it was frustrating for her at times. There was no malice in him, but no sense of responsibility either. In many ways, Blake refused to grow up. It made him delightful to be with, as long as you never expected too much. Once in a while he'd surprise them, and do something really thoughtful and wonderful, and then he'd fly off again. She wondered if things would have been different, if he hadn't made the fortune he did at thirtytwo. It had changed his life and theirs forever. She almost wished he hadn't made all that money on his dot-com windfall. Their life had been sweet at times before that. But with the money, everything had changed.

Maxine met Blake while she was doing her residency at Stanford Hospital. He had been working in Silicon Valley, in the world of hightech investments. He had been making plans for his fledgling company then, she'd never fully understood it, but was fascinated by his incredible energy and passion for the ideas he was developing. They had met at a party she didn't want to go to, but a friend had dragged her along. She'd been working in the trauma unit for two days straight and was half asleep the night they met. Blake had woken her up with a bang. The next day he had taken her for a helicopter ride, and they had flown over the bay, and under the Golden Gate Bridge. Being with him had been thrilling, and their relationship had taken off like a forest fire in a strong wind after that. They were married in less than a year. She was twenty-seven when they got married, and it had been a whirlwind year. Ten months after their wedding, Blake sold his company for a fortune. The rest was history. He turned the money into even more, seemingly without effort. He was willing to risk it all and was truly a genius at what he did. Maxine had been dazzled by his foresight, skill, and brilliant mind.

By the time Daphne was born, two years after their wedding, Blake had made an unheard-of amount of money, and wanted Max to give up her career. Instead, she became chief resident in adolescent psychiatry, gave birth to Daphne, and found herself married to one of the richest men in the world. It was a lot to adjust to and digest. And as a result of either denial or overconfidence in the ability of nursing her baby to keep her from getting pregnant, she got pregnant with Jack six weeks after Daphne was born. By the time the second baby came, Blake had bought the house in London and the one in Aspen, had ordered the boat, and they moved back to New York. He retired soon after that. And even after Jack was born, Maxine didn't give up her career. Her maternity leave was shorter than one of Blake's trips, and he was all over the map by then. They hired a live-in nanny, and Maxine went back to work.

It was a handicap working while Blake wasn't, but the life he was leading frightened her. It was too freewheeling, opulent, and jet set for her. While Maxine opened her own practice, and signed up for an important research project on childhood trauma, Blake hired the most important decorator in London to do their house, and a different one to do Aspen, and bought the house in St. Bart's as a Christmas gift for her, and a plane for himself. For Maxine, it was happening much too fast, and after that, it never slowed down. They had houses, babies, and an unbelievable fortune, and Blake was on the covers of both Newsweek and Time. He went on making investments, which continued to double and triple his money, but he never went back to work in any formal sense. Whatever he did, he managed to accomplish on the computer and phone. And eventually, their marriage seemed to be happening on the phone as well. Blake was as loving as ever when they were together, but most of the time, he just wasn't around.

At one point, Maxine even thought about giving up work, and talked to her father about it. But in the end, her conclusion was that there wasn't much point. What would she do then? Fly around with him from one house to another, hotels in other cities where they didn't have houses, or on the fabulous vacations he took, on safari in Africa, climbing mountains in the Himalayas, financing archaeological digs, or racing boats? There was nothing Blake couldn't accomplish, and even less that he was afraid to attempt. He had to do, try, taste, and have it all. She couldn't imagine dragging two toddlers along to most of the places he went, so much of the time she stayed home with the kids in New York, and she could never quite bring herself to let go and give up her work. Every suicidal kid she saw, every traumatized child, convinced her that there was a need for what she did. She had won two prestigious awards for her research projects, and at times she felt almost schizophrenic, trying to meet up with her husband on his jet-set life in Venice, Sardinia, or St. Moritz, going to the nursery school to pick up their children in New York, or working on psychiatric research projects, and giving lectures. She was leading three lives all at once. Eventually, Blake stopped begging her to come with him, and resigned himself to traveling alone. He was no longer able to sit still, the world was at his feet, and never big enough for him. He became an absentee husband and father almost overnight, while Maxine tried to make a contribution to bettering the lives of suicidal and traumatized adolescents and young children, and their own. Her life and Blake's couldn't have been further apart. No matter how much they loved each other, eventually the only bridge they had left between them was their kids.

For the next five years, they led separate lives, meeting briefly all over the world, when and where it suited Blake, and then she got pregnant with Sam. He was an accident that happened when they met for a weekend in Hong Kong, right after Blake had been trekking with friends in Nepal. Maxine had just won a new research grant on anorexia in young girls. She discovered she was pregnant, and unlike the other pregnancies, this time she wasn't thrilled. It was one more thing for her to juggle, one more child for her to parent by herself, one more piece of the puzzle that was already too complicated and too big. But Blake was overjoyed. He said he wanted half a dozen kids, which made no sense to Maxine. He hardly saw the ones they had. Jack was six and Daphne seven when Sam was born. Having missed the birth, Blake flew in the day after, with a box from Harry Winston in his hand. He gave Maxine a thirty-carat emerald ring, which was spectacular, but not what she wanted from him. She would much rather have had time together. She missed their early days in California, when they were both working and happy, before he won the dot-com lottery that radically changed their lives.