Never too late, p.1
Never Too Late, page 1
Never Too Late 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.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Steel, Danielle, author.
Title: Never too late : a novel / Danielle Steel.
Description: New York : Delacorte Press, [2024]
Identifiers: LCCN 2023006136 (print) | LCCN 2023006137 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593498408 (hardback) | ISBN 9780593498415 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3569.T33828 N48 2024 (print) | LCC PS3569.T33828 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23/eng/20230216
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006136
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006137
Ebook ISBN 9780593498415
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design: Diane Luger
Cover images: © Alexander Spatari/Getty Images (cityscape), © runna10/Getty Images (chairs and table), © Nastco/Getty Images (bush), © Ellena.kim/Getty Images (flowers)
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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
Dedication
By Danielle Steel
About the Author
_146382208_
Chapter 1
Kezia Cooper Hobson flew from San Francisco to New York in first class, with four big suitcases that held the last of her things she was bringing to New York. Everything had been sent ahead weeks before, her clothes, all her mementos, her papers and personal treasures. Her furniture and art were due to arrive at the end of August. She’d been living at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco for the last month, while she concluded the sale of both her Pacific Heights home and her share of the venture capital firm she had inherited from her husband, Andrew Hobson, when he had died of Covid-19 five years before, after a business trip to China. Twenty years older than Kezia, he was seventy-five at the time, vital, healthy, active, handsome, successful, and youthful for his age. The virus had hit him hard and he was dead in five days. He was a wonderful person from a wholesome Midwestern background. He had gone west to Stanford for college and business school, established his groundbreaking business in San Francisco, and remained there.
Andrew Hobson had been one of the legends of early venture capital and one of its innovators in high-tech and biotech investments.
The firm he had founded originally with two partners had been bought by a newer, larger venture capital firm, since Andrew’s partners had been older than he and were now well into their eighties. The life had gone out of Weintraub, Mills, and Hobson once Andrew was gone, with his incredible energy and constant daring new ideas. One of his partners was ill now, the other eager to retire, and the offer they received for the firm had come at the right time. Kezia had been active on the board since Andrew’s death.
Originally from a small town in Vermont, the only child of a widowed and dedicated country doctor, Kezia had shared a thrilling life with Andrew. She had met him at a high-tech medical conference she went to in San Francisco, and married him not long after that, when she was thirty-five. The twenty years they had been married had been extraordinary, and profoundly happy. He had shown and taught and shared things with her that she would never have experienced otherwise. San Francisco had been the perfect small city to bring up their two daughters, with an agreeable cultural life and active business life for him of major international proportions with important investments in Asia, and good schools for their two girls. But once widowed at fifty-five, she found the city small and lifeless and limited. It was a lonely life for her. Everyone in her social circle was married, many of the men to younger women, much younger than Kezia by then. Her girls, Kate and Felicity, had gone east to college and never moved back to San Francisco. They loved living in New York, so Kezia traveled there frequently, to see them. She was bored with the opera and ballet boards she had served on for years. It all felt different as a widow. She felt like the odd man out with her married friends, and the city was just too small and provincial to provide an interesting life for her as a single woman. She could see herself growing old, with nothing changing in her life for the next forty years or more.
In exchange for the golden life Andrew had given her, she felt an obligation to remain involved with his company and sit on the board, but the offer to buy the company that came along unexpectedly was a blessing for Andrew’s partners, and for Kezia. It forced her to re-evaluate her life and decide how she wanted to spend the rest of it, and where. It was time to let go of the past and move on. She would be turning sixty in the fall, even if she didn’t look it, and it felt like the right time to make a bold move and reenter the world, at fifty-nine.
Once she’d made the decision, her house sold quickly, and with two daughters in New York, it was the obvious place for her to go, and it would give her the life she needed and wanted after twenty-five years in San Francisco, the last five of them without Andrew. San Francisco had stopped making sense for her once he was gone. He had added life to it for her.
One of her daughters had a booming career and life in the city, the other lived in the West Village and some of the time in a house close to the Vermont town where she and her mother had been born. Kate was trying to write a book. She spent enough time in New York that Kezia knew she’d see more of her if she lived there herself than she would visiting her from San Francisco.
Kezia was excited about the move. Her whole focus was turned to what lay ahead for her.
She was still beautiful at fifty-nine, and easily looked ten years younger than she was. She was tall and slim, with a lithe, youthful, trim figure and strikingly pretty face, with blond hair and deep blue eyes. She felt profoundly revitalized and renewed by the move to New York. San Francisco was just too small and too sleepy and now that she was no longer married to Andrew, even though she was a powerful force on the board of the company, people forgot about her. She wasn’t by any means ready to give up her life yet, and quietly close her doors and sit at home. New York had all the life, vitality, and energy she craved, and with her daughters there, it made total sense. She was sorry she hadn’t made the leap sooner. She was in great spirits on the flight on the way there.
It was the last week in June, and the weather was warm. The airport was teeming when she arrived on a Friday afternoon. She already knew that both her daughters were out of town for the weekend. Her younger daughter, Felicity, was working in Paris for two weeks, at Paris Fashion Week. At twenty-three, she had become a stunningly successful model and had been on magazine covers all over the world for the past three years. She had been eighteen when her father died, and she went to college at USC in L.A., as he would have wanted her to. But she had never been a strong student, and she dropped out after two years, when she was discovered by the head of a major New York modeling agency. Within the first six months she was on the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and L’Officiel, and was known all over the world as the most exciting new face to come along in years. Felicity was responsible about her career. She took it seriously, and worked hard, and Kezia was proud of her success. Felicity had bought her own apartment in Tribeca from her earnings a year before, at twenty-two, and led a glamorous life that would have turned most women’s heads. She had learned to spot the men who pursued most models and were just looking for entertainment or arm candy, or simply wanted to be able to say they’d gone out with her. She had a tendency to go out with older men. Her boyfriend for the last year, Blake White, led a fashionable jet-set life at thirty-nine, and had a big job as a wealth management consultant at Goldman Sachs for some very illustrious clients. He was from a prosperous family himself, knew many important people as clients and friends, and loved going out with beautiful young women. But he also saw something deeper and different in Felicity, something that he hadn’t come across before. In spite of her success and the money her father left her, she had sound values, strong family ties, and a good mind, and was more sensible than most women her age. Her own success hadn’t turned her head. She was upbeat and fun to be with. Blake had been married before, to a socialite he had grown up with. He was divorced and had a six-year-old son, Alex, who spent alternate weekends with them, and would be with Blake for the month of August.
Felicity enjoyed spending time with Alex, and he loved her. She treated him more as a big sister would, rather than taking on a motherly role, which Blake also liked about her. She had no hidden agenda, considered her
Kezia knew that Felicity had been in Paris for fittings all week, at the various houses she would be “walking” for in the fashion shows. Both Chanel and Dior had hired her as one of their star models, and she was spending the weekend in Saint-Tropez at the house of friends of Blake’s. He had flown over to be with her and see her in the haute couture shows the following week. Kezia couldn’t wait for her to see the new apartment when she got back. She had gone all out with a real showplace in New York.
The apartment Kezia had bought was half of the penthouse floor in a relatively new sixty-story building on Fifty-fifth Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. It was two floors taller than any other building near it, and she had a hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the city. She had been ordering furniture and draperies with a New York decorator for the past few months, and it was going to be sublimely comfortable and elegant. She had put some of the old furniture in a storage unit to keep for the girls. She had sold a lot of it, and sent only her favorite pieces to New York. It was a new world, a new life, a new home. She had kept most of the art because she loved it.
Kezia had rented the bare-bones basics from a staging company her decorator had recommended, so that she’d have a bed, several dressers, and a chair in her bedroom, two couches in her enormous living room, some comfortable chairs in case she had guests, a big coffee table, and a large dining table and chairs in the kitchen. She didn’t need more than that until her furniture arrived at the end of August.
She had made no summer plans. She was looking forward to two months in New York, exploring new shops and restaurants and obscure museums. Her daughters were horrified that she was staying in the city, and Kezia insisted she didn’t mind the heat or the tourists. She was going to make the city her own before the summer was over. Felicity had rented a house in Southampton for June, July, and August, and she and Blake would commute for work when necessary and were planning to entertain there. Alex would be with them in August. Felicity wanted her mother to come visit. She was always warm and welcoming, and mother and daughter had fun together, usually spontaneous adventures or evenings on the spur of the moment when Felicity was free.
Kate, Kezia’s older daughter, was more complicated, and always had been. She was just as beautiful and striking as her younger sister, but everything about her was more serious and more intense. She had dark brown hair and big brown eyes, and delicate features. She was smaller than Felicity, who was tall and looked a great deal like Kezia, with blond hair and blue eyes. Kate’s beginnings were very different from Felicity’s, and yet she had been just as fortunate, possibly even more so.
* * *
—
Kezia’s mother had died of breast cancer when Kezia was three, and she had no memory of her, although her father spoke of her constantly in glowing terms. She had been a nurse and worked with him. Kezia had grown up in a tiny town in Vermont as the daughter of the local general practitioner, and he had shared with her his dedication to medicine, which was his passion. Her childhood had been a happy one, and Thornton Cooper was a loving, attentive father. Kezia had stayed close to home and attended the University of Vermont, as a science major, and entered nursing school in Boston after she graduated, to become a nurse practitioner and work with her father, which was her lifelong dream, and his. Shortly after she began the nurse practitioner program, she had discovered that she was pregnant, by a boy she’d had a romance with that summer, Reed Phillips. But neither of them had intended for it to be long-term. It was a hot summer romance they both knew couldn’t last. She was going to nursing school, and he was a medical student at Dartmouth and was starting his internship in L.A. He had a summer job at a small country inn in Vermont, where he met Kezia.
Discovering that she was pregnant when she got to Boston after the summer was not good news for either of them. She liked Reed, but there was no hope of a future for them. They were headed in different directions, on opposite coasts. When she called to tell him she was pregnant, he came to see her. He was three years older than Kezia, steeped in his medical studies, and planning to move to L.A. for his internship. He liked Kezia a lot but he wasn’t in love with her, nor she with him. There was no room in his life for a wife and a baby, and he made that clear. His life’s dream was to go to Africa and work with Doctors Without Borders. His and Kezia’s career goals were similar in medicine, but their paths were not destined to intersect in the future. She planned to work in a small Vermont rural town with her father, and Reed wanted a life a world away in underdeveloped countries.
Reed was very direct that he could not participate in the life of a baby. He would help her support it if necessary, but he was not going to engage in fatherhood with her. It was the last thing he wanted, and he didn’t want to mislead her. Kezia spoke to her father after she’d spoken to Reed, told him what had happened, and offered to drop out of the nursing program. She had a partial scholarship, and her father was paying the rest. Her father was, as he always had been, loving and compassionate and generous with her. The baby was due at the end of the spring semester. He insisted that she stick with her studies, have the baby over the summer, and leave the baby with him in the fall and go back to school. He and a local girl would care for the baby during the week, and Kezia would come home on weekends from Boston to take care of her child. It would be arduous for both of them, but he was more than willing to do it. He would have done anything for her. Miraculously, it all went according to plan. Reed, the baby’s father, stayed true to form too.
When the baby was born, Kezia named her after her mother, Kate Morgan Cooper. Reed was starting his internship in L.A. by then, and never came to Vermont to see the baby. He had sent Kezia relinquishment forms as soon as the baby was born. He wanted no responsibility for her. He offered to pay support, in spite of surrendering all parental rights, and Kezia refused. She didn’t want money from him if he wanted no involvement with the child. They signed the papers when Kate was less than a month old, and he left her life without ever entering it. Until she was twelve, the only parents Kate knew were her mother and grandfather in the small town where Kezia had grown up.
It was a happy, carefree life. From time to time, when she was younger, Kate wanted to know why other children had a father and she didn’t, and Kezia simply said that it had worked out that way. She explained that Kate’s father was a doctor, he worked in Africa, and they couldn’t be together. It was enough information for her as a young child. She spared Kate the additional information later that he had married a South African physician who also worked for Doctors Without Borders. Kezia had heard it by chance when she met someone who had gone to medical school with him. Kezia never heard from Reed again after he signed the relinquishment papers. Just as he had told her, he wanted a clean break. Kezia had wanted her baby anyway, doubly so to make it up to her for not having a father. And Kezia’s father had been wonderful to both of them.
Kate had an easy, healthy childhood, adored by her mother and grandfather, and Kezia loved working as the nurse practitioner in her father’s practice. No one in their little rural town had sparked Kezia’s romantic interest, few wanted to date or marry a woman with a child, and some were bothered that she hadn’t been married to Kate’s father. It was a small, gossipy town.
