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    Lost and Found: A Novel
    Lost and Found: A Novel
    Lost and Found: A Novel
    Ebook292 pages4 hours

    Lost and Found: A Novel

    By Danielle Steel

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • What might have been? That tantalizing question propels a woman on a cross-country adventure to reunite with the men she loved and let go, in Danielle Steel’s exhilarating new novel.

    It all starts with a fall from a ladder, in a firehouse in New York City. The firehouse has been converted into a unique Manhattan home and studio where renowned photographer Madison Allen works and lives after raising three children on her own. But the accident, which happens while Maddie is sorting through long-forgotten personal mementos and photos, results in more than a broken ankle. It changes her life.

    Spurred by old memories, the forced pause in her demanding schedule, and an argument with her daughter that leads to a rare crisis of confidence, Maddie embarks on a road trip.  She hopes to answer questions about the men she loved and might have married—but didn’t—in the years after she was left alone with three young children. Wearing a cast and driving a rented SUV, she sets off to reconnect with three very different men—one in Boston, one in Chicago, and another in Wyoming—to know once and for all if the decisions she made long ago were the right ones. Before moving forward into the future, she is compelled to confront the past.

    As the miles and days pass, and with each new encounter, Maddie’s life comes into clearer focus and a new future takes shape. A deeply felt story about love, motherhood, family, and fate, Lost and Found is an irresistible new novel from America’s most dynamic storyteller.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDell
    Release dateJun 25, 2019
    ISBN9780399179488
    Author

    Danielle Steel

    Danielle Steel has been hailed as one of the world's most popular authors, with over 650 million copies of her novels sold. Her many international bestsellers include Property of a Noblewoman, Blue, Precious Gifts, Undercover, Country, Prodigal Son, Pegasus, A Perfect Life, and other highly acclaimed novels. She is also the author of His Bright Light, the story of her son Nick Traina's life and death; A Gift of Hope, a memoir of her work with the homeless; and the children's books Pretty Minnie in Paris and Pretty Minnie in Hollywood.

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    Reviews for Lost and Found

    3.5/5

    31 ratings4 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Mmmmm. This was pretty good. I liked the two main characters. I enjoyed the writing. And the gentle love story touched my heart.

      William, a British writer living on the idyllic California coast, found the love of his life, Maddie, a professional photographer, at 59. They met when Maddie took an unheard three week holiday amid that American work life when Americans get so few holidays and yet they feel guilty even taking those!

      As Maddie found, new faces enter your life.

      But not enough happened? Can't say exactly why it didn't appeal to me. While I nearly finished it, it wasn't a book I'd recommend.
    • 5/5
      Lost and Found by Danielle Steel
      What I like right from the start is the lead character is into photography.
      Madison has raised her 3 kids and then bought the old firehouse to live in.
      She's competitive with fashion and design...her children are all different: one likes fashion, one design, one business.
      She hoped to get the kids and their kids to spend time around the Christmas holidays but the firehouse stairs and pole were not the right places for young child.
      Other children grew up and do very well in their jobs and in their kids. They are too wrapped up in their lives to even call the other siblings or their mother.
      Kinda sad, her life and she makes a choice while cleaning out a closet and seeing letters from the men who loved her and after breaking her ankle she'd go visit each of them.
      She knows after visiting the first two that she had made the right choice and followed her dreams by letting them go.
      Third man who bought land and created his own ranch in WY was the one she was too late for.
      She decided then to just go visit the kids in CA. Love the travel and wish there were more time she had spent there describing it all.
      Ben her son the one who spent more time reaching out to her wants her to come visit. His wife is too busy for a visit and he puts his foot down that he will spend time with her.
      She heads to Big Sur to relax and meets a man from England and they take a liking to one another.
      Love the time she gets to spend with her kids before heading back to NY for work. It's a wonder a severe world wide catastrophe brings them back to one another..
      Some sex scenes but love the locations.
      I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).
    • 3/5
      Not one of Steel's better efforts. All the characters felt overdrawn, and then everyone changed too much to create the happy ending.
    • 3/5
      Lost and Found is a story about a women’s self-reflective journey. Maddie Allen is a famous photographer who is divorced and on her own after raising her three children. She does not have a close relationship with any of her kids, and Maddie leads a quiet life focusing on her work where she excels. Maddie loves her home which is a converted firehouse with a spiral staircase and where she has her studio and offices on the ground floor. After breaking her ankle in a fall and a dress down from her eldest daughter, Maddie decides to take a trip. She wants to see if the choices she made in the past were the right ones. It also allows Maddie to reflect on her life, lay old ghosts to rest and see what the future holds for her. Lost and Found reminds me of Danielle Steel’s earlier books. It is a light women’s fiction story with a heaping helping of romance and a splash of fairy tale (happily ever after). I like the author’s relaxed writing style. It makes the story easy to read and it has a smooth flow. I did not understand how Maddie could let her daughter run roughshod over her and be intimidated by Deanna’s words. Of course, critical comments from family affect us more than remarks from others. There is a significant amount of repetition in the first half of the book. After a while, I knew the information by heart (a little rewriting would have dramatically improved this book). As Maddie’s journey progresses, the story improves. I was especially moved by her Wyoming visit. There were some heartwarming scenes that were touching. I liked seeing the characters develop and the changes in various relationships. I agree with Maddie when she said. “strange things happen in life when you don’t expect them”. Sometimes it helps to look back before moving forward. Lost and Found is sweet story about reflection, family, romance, and choices.

    Book preview

    Lost and Found - Danielle Steel

    Chapter 1

    Madison Allen lived in an old brick firehouse in the West Village in downtown New York, a few blocks east of the Hudson River. The firehouse was a hundred years old. It had been a departure for Maddie, after living on the Upper East Side most of her life. She had raised her three children in a comfortable although not luxurious apartment, in a serious-looking prewar building. Buying the firehouse downtown had been an act of independence for her, and it had become a labor of love. She had bought it fifteen years before, when her youngest child, Milagra, had left for college. Her older two, Deanna and Ben, were twenty and twenty-one when she bought it, and still came home for school holidays. Two years later, they had moved into their own apartments, and never came home to live again after they had graduated.

    Deanna moved into an apartment in Chelsea and got a job as an assistant designer for a successful contemporary fashion brand that was popular with young women. She had gone to Parsons School of Design and had real talent. She was fiercely competitive with other designers and single-minded with her love of fashion, always focused on her own success. She was less intellectual than her brother and sister. Ben, her younger brother, had a keen instinct for business and had done well. Milagra, the youngest, had been writing since she was fifteen, and her first novel was published by the time she was nineteen. All three of Maddie’s children were very different from each other, with their interests in design, business, and literature. Unlike her younger siblings, Deanna had a killer instinct.

    After graduating from Berkeley, Ben had decided to stay in San Francisco, in the world of start-ups. He swore he’d never come back to New York to live, and he hadn’t. He loved the outdoors, California life, and the high-tech world. He was a kind and loving person, a good husband and father, and caring son, although Maddie seldom saw him, and rarely contacted any of them. She didn’t want to intrude on them now that they were adults, and most of the time waited to hear from them. Sometimes it was a long wait, so she called them. But she held out as long as she could.

    Milagra had gone to UCLA, taken postgraduate writing classes at Stanford, and moved to Mendocino in northern California. She needed isolation to write her books, and silence. So Maddie heard from her the least often.

    Maddie would have rattled around her old apartment alone, like a marble in a shoebox, if she’d stayed there. When she moved downtown, her children had been shocked, and objected strenuously. They felt awkward in their mother’s new and somewhat unusual home. But she was firm about it and knew it was right for her at the time and they would adjust to it eventually. And as she knew they would, they grew up and left.

    The firehouse still had its original brass pole that the firemen had used to slide down. She had someone come in to polish it every few months, and had tried sliding down it once herself. It was scary and exciting and fun, though she had come down faster than she’d expected. Buying the firehouse had been a happy event for her, and a new adventure. She’d loved it then and still did.

    And the statement she made with the move was not as harsh as her children had claimed or feared. There were four floors, with two good-sized rooms and a smaller one that shared a bathroom on the top floor and were set up as bedrooms for Ben, Deanna, and Milagra whenever they wanted to come home. They had hardly ever used them, and now, fifteen years later, never stayed there at all.

    With a successful start-up to his credit in his life as a young entrepreneur, Ben had no time to come home. After he sold the business and started a second one, he was even busier. He had a knack for discovering a need that no one else had thought of, and capitalizing on it. Married now, at thirty-five, with three children of his own, Willie, Charlie, and Olive, six, five, and three, he rarely came to New York, and stayed at a hotel when he did. His wife, Laura, was from Grosse Pointe, a suburb of Detroit, and had friends and relatives in Chicago, but she came no farther east than that.

    They had full and busy lives in San Francisco, and a beautiful house with a spectacular view of the city in Belvedere, a tiny island of high-priced real estate in Marin County, twenty minutes from San Francisco. They were so heavily scheduled between Ben’s work, the social schedule Laura arranged for them, and all the activities for the children that it was never a good time for Maddie to come out, even for a brief visit. The few times she had she’d felt like an intruder. Her grandchildren scarcely knew her. She saw them once or twice a year for a few days, and could barely keep up with their after-school activities, computer lessons, karate, soccer, swimming classes, and ballet for Olive, along with their constant playdates and the other activities their mother organized for them. Laura kept everyone busy, and successfully kept Maddie at bay, although Maddie never complained. Her son was happy, which was good enough for her. She would have liked to see more of him, and to live in the same city, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Maddie was generous about it. She always tried to be tolerant of their differences from her, and had encouraged them to follow their dreams, and be independent.

    She had sensed on the day of the wedding that she had lost Ben to his new in-laws. Ben and Laura spent Christmas in Grosse Pointe with Laura’s parents, and her siblings and their children. Her parents’ home on the Big Island in Hawaii was an easy vacation spot for all of them. Ben and his family went there for most school holidays, or to Mexico, or Aspen. Nothing Maddie had to offer could compete. She had no country home, and a busy work life herself. They could have stayed at the firehouse with her in New York, but she recognized that, as Ben’s family grew rapidly, it would have been too cramped, even dangerous for such young children, with the narrow circular metal staircase and the fire pole. She was hoping to get them to New York on their own when they were older, but that wouldn’t be for a long time. And Laura’s goal in the meantime was to be important in the San Francisco social scene and show off her husband’s success. There was no time or room for Maddie in all that.

    Milagra lived in an entirely different universe from Ben, in windswept, foggy, rugged Mendocino. She had bought a small crumbling Victorian house after she sold her second book, and she restored the house herself. She never drove the three or four hours to San Francisco. She wrote eerie, haunting gothic novels, which weren’t bestsellers but enjoyed a steady, moderate success, enough for her to live comfortably. She had a solid following of faithful readers who loved her books. Her work was dark and strange, and her isolated life in Mendocino suited her. She had started writing at fifteen and had nearly been a recluse ever since. Milagra didn’t need people around her to be happy. In fact, she preferred her solitude so she could write. Even a friendly phone call felt like an intrusion to her, so she didn’t give her number to anyone, and called no one. Most of her contact with her mother was by email, when her internet was working. She had internet access where she lived, most of the time, but poor cellphone reception, which suited her perfectly. She was always working on a book, and at thirty-three she lived alone, with three large dogs and two stray cats. She hardly ever saw her brother, but emailed him from time to time. She never wrote to Deanna. They were just too different. She hadn’t been to New York in six years, since she’d bought her house. Maddie visited her whenever Milagra was between books and allowed her to.

    Milagra had gotten her name when Maddie had almost lost her several times before she was born. They named her Miracle in Spanish. She was a solitary person whose life was her work. She had nothing in common with Ben and his wife, Laura, and Milagra always told her mother that they had nothing to say to each other when they met. She had even less in common with her older sister, Deanna, who was hardworking, hard-driving, and fully engaged in the fast-paced world of fashion in New York. Milagra had always thought her sister aggressive, and said she scared her. Deanna had bullied her as a child and ordered her around, always convinced that she knew best. Deanna had always called Milagra the weird one.

    Deanna was married to David Harper, the executive editor of a highly respected publishing house. As a designer, Deanna made more money than he did, and she added glamour to his life. She had always had a sharp edge, even as a child, and an equally sharp tongue. But she and David were a good match. She ran their life together and her career with an iron hand. They had two daughters, Lily, seven, and Kendra, nine, and Deanna was as ambitious for them as she was for herself. They went to one of the best private schools in New York, and were just as busy as Ben’s children with after-school activities. Kendra was serious about ballet, and Lily took hip-hop lessons. They both took violin and piano. Deanna had their lives carefully mapped out.

    All four of them retreated to their house in the Berkshires on weekends, where David could read manuscripts, Deanna could work on designs, and the girls could take riding lessons. The girls were taken care of by a nanny, which gave David and Deanna a break from their stressful high-powered lives during the week.

    Deanna never invited her mother to spend weekends with them. They entertained in New York but never included her there either. Deanna had always been critical of her mother, and thought she was too much of a freethinker, and a little eccentric. The firehouse had been the first sign of it, in her opinion, although it suited Maddie perfectly, much more than an empty, lonely apartment uptown would have, once they’d grown up. David and Deanna lived in a co-op in the East 70s, between Madison and Park. The apartment had been photographed by Architectural Digest and Deanna had decorated it herself. Maddie’s neighborhood in the West Village was warm and friendly, with small restaurants, fun shops, and people wandering the streets in good weather on the weekends. Maddie went for long walks along the river, which both invigorated and relaxed her. Her contact with her oldest daughter was often tense. At thirty-six, Deanna was outspoken about whatever she didn’t like, and she thought that her mother living in an antiquated firehouse was Bohemian, made no sense, and was even embarrassing. Why couldn’t she live in an apartment uptown like other people her age?

    It made perfect sense to Maddie, and when she restored the firehouse, she set it up for her convenience, with the guest bedrooms on the top floor for her absentee children. The floor below it, the third floor, was made up of her own bedroom and a small sitting room she spent her evenings in, reading or doing research relevant to her work. Her living room was on the second floor, along with a renovated kitchen large enough to eat in. She never entertained, but she could have, at her table for ten. And on the ground floor were two small offices, one for herself and the other for her assistant, Penny. The large space with twenty-foot ceilings once used to house the fire trucks was her photography studio. Once she moved in, she was able to live and work in the same place for the first time, and her clients loved coming there. It was sparsely but stylishly decorated, she had wonderful, eclectic taste, and great style. She had a collection of antique fireman’s helmets from around the world on one wall, which fascinated people. Everything about the place was interesting, unusual, warm, and charming, like Maddie herself.

    Maddie had backed into her career by accident. Blond, tall, and lithe, with an exquisite face, she had done some modeling after college at NYU. Her parents were both high school teachers. She hadn’t figured out her own career, all she knew was that she didn’t want to be a teacher like them. They were underpaid, overworked, and disillusioned with the public school system. She modeled as a stopgap, for the money, and it paid well. She hadn’t enjoyed modeling but she liked the freedom it gave her. She had her own apartment on the East Side in a decent neighborhood. She hated the cattle calls, the pressure, nasty magazine editors, and bitchy, competitive girls, but she was able to live on what she made, and only planned to model for a year or two. She had majored in art history in college, which didn’t pay her rent when she graduated, and her parents weren’t able to help.

    Within months, she was noticed by a well-known French fashion photographer, Stephane Barbier, who lived and worked in New York. He hotly pursued her personally and professionally. She fell in love with him, and he convinced her he was madly in love with her too.

    Six months into their passionate relationship, she discovered she was pregnant with Deanna. After long nights when Stephane drank too much and smoked furiously, they decided to get married at city hall. Her parents would have objected to the hasty decision, but Maddie’s father was dying of cancer by then, and her mother was too devastated to pay attention to what her only child was doing. Maddie settled into life with Stephane in utter bliss. It wasn’t how she had intended to start her life, with a shotgun marriage, but it all seemed to be working out. Once her pregnancy showed and she couldn’t model, Stephane put Maddie to work as one of his studio assistants. She became an avid student of everything he did. She loved watching him during the shoots, and continued working for him after the baby was born, eventually becoming his first assistant on every shoot he did. When Deanna was four months old, believing that nursing would keep her from getting pregnant, Maddie got pregnant with Ben. Stephane was ecstatic when their son was born and acted as though Maddie had really done it right. Deanna had been a fussy, difficult baby. Ben was a ray of sunshine, always laughing and smiling, almost from the moment he was born.

    The marriage held up for three years, until Milagra was born after a difficult pregnancy. Maddie was eight months pregnant when she discovered Stephane’s torrid affair with a nineteen-year-old Polish model, the star of the hour, and all the infidelities that had come before her. Their life unraveled rapidly, and by the time Milagra was born, Maddie’s world was crashing down. Stephane was drinking too much, and his career was slipping by then. When Milagra was a month old, Stephane told Maddie he was leaving her and going back to Paris with his new love. Maddie’s mother had died the year before, of cancer like her father, and she had no one to turn to. At twenty-five, Maddie was abandoned with three young children, and no way to support herself. Her parents had had nothing to leave her. She had to live by her wits and hard work, and would have to pay for childcare while she did. Stephane told her bluntly that he couldn’t afford to pay child support, and left. She didn’t want to go back to modeling, although she could have and would have if she had had no other choice. Instead she took a job as another photographer’s assistant, for a salary she could just barely manage to exist on to feed her children, pay for day care for the kids, and pay her rent. He was a young, earnest photographer, just starting out in the business. True to his word, Stephane sent her not a penny from Paris, and she heard that he was having a baby with the Polish girl. She filed for divorce, and rapidly discovered that she knew much more about photography than her new employer did. In a bold move, she decided to work as a fashion photographer herself. The money she made increased quickly beyond subsistence level, and within two years she became more successful than Stephane had ever been. She was willing to work hard, long hours, and collaborated well with the major fashion magazines. They loved her work.

    She and the children never heard from Stephane after he left and less than two years after he moved back to Paris, he died in a motorcycle accident. His death didn’t change anything for her or the children, except the idea that the children had a father who might want to see them again someday. By the time he died, he was no longer with the Polish girl. She had left him for someone else and taken the baby with her, and his career had tanked after he went back to France. When the money and his prospects ran out, the Polish girl did too. He had left behind in the world four children he had done nothing for.

    Maddie was alone in the world with three children. She worked harder than ever, and became one of the most sought-after fashion photographers in New York. The lean years were over for her then. She had a life and a successful career she loved. It allowed her to spend time with her children, except when she had to shoot on location. She had a housekeeper who took care of the children when she had to go away, but she was with them as much as she could be in her off hours.

    Maddie managed to balance her life efficiently, and eventually broadened her work to include portraits of important people and celebrities. For her own satisfaction, once her children were in college, she expanded her scope further to include major newsworthy events and moving human portraits at the scenes of wars and natural disasters, showing old men and women, devastated young children, lovers in each other’s arms, some women holding dead children and others giving birth. She went to elections, riots, demonstrations, earthquakes. She took the high-risk assignments she wouldn’t when her children were younger, out of a sense of responsibility to them. She was in love with the human condition, sometimes at its worst, seen through the camera’s lens, whatever caught her eye, grabbed her heart, or fascinated her and the people who saw her photographs, and bought them.

    In recent years she did less and less work in fashion, although she was still very much in demand. Thirty years into her career, she could pick and choose who and what she photographed now.

    The firehouse was the perfect setting for her. Her clients loved coming there, exploring it, and listening to her talk about it. Maddie had a warm, modest, humble way of dealing with her subjects. It put them totally at ease and the photographs she took of them were extraordinary and looked straight into their souls.

    Ben was very proud of her, although from a distance. Milagra paid little attention to her mother’s career, only her own, and Deanna always had some caustic comment to make or criticism to offer about her mother’s work. Maddie was used to it, and tried not to let it upset her, but sometimes it did anyway. Deanna knew just where to put the knife and when to turn it. At times, Maddie wondered if Deanna was jealous of her, even though that seemed unlikely since she was successful on her own. But Deanna had a fierce competitive streak with everyone. To Deanna, life was a race she had to win, no matter who she had to kill to do so. She’d had a sharp tongue all her life, and only her husband didn’t seem to mind it. He liked how ambitious she was and admired the results. She pushed him hard too, and her daughters.

    Deanna dropped in at the firehouse occasionally, usually unannounced, at a convenient time for her, with total disregard for her mother’s schedule. She acted as though Maddie were a housewife taking photographs as a hobby, rather than one of the most important photographers in the business. There had even been two museum shows of her work, which only impressed Deanna briefly. Her husband, David, was more generous about his mother-in-law, and realized how talented and respected she was. But even he couldn’t curb Deanna and rarely tried to. Maddie had never been able to either, and she sympathized with David. Her oldest daughter was a force to be reckoned with, and she was just as harsh with her own children, although Maddie was sure she loved them. Deanna was very much her own person, and, at thirty-six, nothing was going to change her. And Maddie was too wise to try.

    Although Maddie felt guilty whenever she thought it, in some ways it was a relief that Deanna didn’t make time to see her more often. Deanna was too busy and thought she was too important herself to spend time with her mother. Deanna had her father’s dark hair and good looks, although none of his irresistible Gallic charm, and none of her mother’s gentle softness, which made all her subjects fall in love with her.

    Maddie was a kind, compassionate woman and it showed. She was strong, and had worked hard for her success, but she never imposed her own will on others. She had earned everything she had fair and square, while being an attentive, loving mother, and she was never demanding of her children’s time. They were all adults now, and she respected the fact that they had busy lives of their own. The reality was that, except for a few old friends she rarely saw and her work, Maddie was essentially alone, and she didn’t mind. Her photography filled her life and satisfied her. She used her time well. Work had occupied her every waking hour since her kids had grown up. And with the passage of time, and busy lives, she and many of her friends had drifted apart. Close friendships were difficult to maintain, working as hard as she did.

    At fifty-eight, divorced for thirty-three years, there had been men in her life. A few of them had been important to her, for a time, but she had never married again. Marrying the men she’d fallen in love with had never seemed like the right thing for her children. Now they were grown up and gone. There hadn’t been a serious man in her life for years. Sometimes she missed the companionship, but she was busy and independent, and didn’t think she could make the necessary compromises to share her life with anyone now. She had gotten comfortable as she was, doing what she wanted, traveling as she wished, making all the decisions herself. She had no desire to give that up or even modify it. She knew she had been more accommodating when she was younger. Now it seemed like too high a price to pay for love, which might be fleeting anyway. Her own freedom appealed to her more.

    Deanna had never liked the men in her mother’s life and openly said so, often to her mother’s consternation. She had always been difficult with the men Maddie loved. Deanna was deeply embarrassed by what she knew about her profligate, philandering father, and was relieved he hadn’t stuck around, although it was clear that her mother had loved him. But Deanna was suspicious of men as a result. Milagra always said that their father sounded romantic, which even Maddie didn’t agree with. He’d been selfish and narcissistic and let them all down when he abandoned them.

    Ben was sorry he had never known his father, whatever his flaws were. He had suffered from not having a father when he was young, although Maddie had been a responsible, caring single parent. But with two sisters and a single mother, he longed to have a man around as he was growing up. He was always sorry when Maddie’s romances ended, and usually blamed his outspoken, ornery sister for it, which

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