Resurrection

Chapter 1

Darcy Gray always put the finishing touches on her blog, The Gray Zone, on Sunday nights, after she’d let it sit for a few days. She liked to take a last look. She posted it on Mondays, and enhanced it with daily posts on Instagram to introduce additional ideas and products she supported. She had started her blog for fun, thirteen years ago, at twenty-nine, when her fraternal twin daughters Zoe and Penny had started kindergarten. It had been the perfect activity for a full-time, hands-on, at-home mom. She had introduced it before blogs were commonplace, and she used it to share her views about upcoming fashions and trends, her opinions on a variety of subjects, research on new health and scientific information. She treated it like a letter to friends. It had gone viral almost immediately, and for more than a decade she had been one of the most respected bloggers and influencers in the country, and even around the world. Her readers trusted her. Her opinion was sought by magazine editors, companies, and trendsetters of all kinds.

In the years since Darcy began writing The Gray Zone, influencers had become a powerful force in the world of promotion and communications. Companies and major brands sought the attention of major influencers to endorse their products and paid as much as twenty-five thousand dollars for a single post, which could add up to a multimillion-dollar business for a blogger like Darcy, one of the most respected in the business. It was a highly desirable job now.

Darcy was sought after for her authenticity—she never wore, used, or recommended a brand or product she didn’t believe in, and her followers had total faith in her. She never let them down or led them astray for her own gain. Blogging and influencing had become a new way for companies to engage directly with individuals and communities on a personal level to promote their products. Darcy had been among the first to catch that wave to success. Her sincerity, good taste, and good judgment shone through every word.

As the only daughter of the head of a distinguished publishing house in New York, and her mother an editor, Darcy had always wanted to write. She just didn’t know what until she started The Gray Zone.

Because of her parents’ involvement in publishing, they had always pushed her in that direction. They were convinced that she had talent as a writer and encouraged literary ambitions at a lofty level. They hoped she would be an important novelist one day and tried to instill that desire in her. She had been an English literature major at Princeton, which had been her parents’ wish for her. It was her father’s alma mater.

Since her parents had been unable to have children for the first twenty years of their marriage, Darcy had been a late, happy surprise. Her father had hoped for a son to follow in his footsteps at Princeton, and into the literary world. Instead, Darcy had agreed to go to Princeton when she was accepted, but she had her sights set on modern pursuits, and her writing aspirations went no further than the internet while she was in college.

The disadvantage she found in having older parents—her mother was forty-six when she was born, and her father ten years older—was that they were overprotective, and old-school in all their views of the world. Both from New York families, venerable and distinguished but with diminished funds, they wanted Darcy to live in their own familiar world, but she was of an entirely different generation and mindset, she was an independent, free-thinking young woman, and her parents’ lofty literary world held no appeal for her. It seemed like a relic of the past.

In their dreams for Darcy, they imagined her following a path similar to their own, working for ten years as a writer or editor in publishing and marrying someone like them one day, with the same goals and interests. Instead, Darcy had met Charles Gray in her junior year at Princeton, through a mutual friend. Ten years older than she, not long out of Columbia Business School, Charlie was following his own unusual dreams, and was determined to make his mark in the world of retail fashion, where he could see there were fortunes to be made. His ideas were exciting and made sense to Darcy. She hadn’t found her own career path yet, but she was sure that he would go far with the plans he explained to her. She loved how modern and ambitious he was.

They had in common the fact that they were both only children of older parents who had set ideas for them. Charlie’s parents were originally from Boston. His father was in banking, and his mother had never worked. His parents couldn’t understand his fascination with the world of retail and would have preferred to see him go into banking like his father. Charlie wanted to own department stores, which made no sense to his parents.

Both sets of parents felt strongly that Darcy and Charles should seek solid jobs working for other people, for salaries they could count on, that their romance could simmer for a decade, and that they should not rush into anything.

Youth won out in the end. Charlie proposed to Darcy the Christmas of her senior year, and despite their parents’ reservations, they were married in June. Their parents were shocked even further when Darcy got pregnant on their honeymoon, with the twins. In their parents’ opinion, they were moving with lightning speed, without careful planning.

The other thing Darcy and Charlie had in common was that they both had parents who were old-fashioned in their views of marriage. They were of a generation that was reserved, as their own parents had been and had modeled for them. They showed little emotion to each other, or even to the children they loved. Charlie and Darcy were excited by each other’s bright minds, and his visions for the future, but at first they were more comfortable talking business than showing overt signs of affection. They had no role models for an affectionate, playful marriage. It was a meeting of the minds and both of them had been shy for a long time about being open with their feelings. It was their daughters who warmed them up eventually and taught them to love more openly. Both Charlie and Darcy recognized that their similar upbringing hadn’t served them well in teaching them to have a loving, demonstrative relationship. It was unfamiliar to them. They loved each other deeply but didn’t show it easily.

It came as no surprise to Charlie or Darcy when they lost both sets of their parents within the first decade of their marriage, in a period of two years. Darcy’s mother was seventy-seven and died of a heart attack in her sleep. Her father, at eighty-seven, had a stroke months later and had been in frail health for several years. Both of Charlie’s parents had died of cancer at seventy-five and eighty, and his father had had severe Alzheimer’s. It left the twins without grandparents, and had been a hard, sad two years as the grandparents died in rapid succession one after the other. Charlie and Darcy supported each other through it. Their parents’ final years hadn’t been easy, for them or their children. It made Darcy grateful that she and Charlie had had their own children when they were at a much earlier age, and were young parents. With nineteen-year-old daughters in college, they were younger now than their parents had been when they were born. Darcy and Charlie still had years ahead of them to have fun and enjoy their lives and pursue their careers, which they both thoroughly enjoyed.

Thirteen years after she started The Gray Zone, at forty-two, with a husband and twin daughters, and over a million followers, Darcy still loved doing it. She had a widely heard voice on many subjects, not just fashion. She was invited to exciting events all over the world and had an extremely lucrative business. Both her fraternal twin daughters had started college a year early, at Boston University, and were juniors year now at nineteen, and were studying abroad for a year. Penny, a tall, lanky dark-haired beauty with blue eyes, who closely resembled her equally striking mother, was studying at the University of Hong Kong. She was an econ major, with a minor in fashion merchandising, and wanted to work for her father at his flagship department store in New York, one of his four stores, when she graduated. She had a calm, quiet, sensible nature. Penny had studied Mandarin in high school and college, and was speaking fairly fluent Cantonese now, after five months in Hong Kong, since September. She felt that speaking Chinese would be useful in business, and for working with the factories her father dealt with for their exclusive lines at the stores. She was living in a luxurious apartment her parents had rented for her in The Peak section of the city, with three female roommates. Unlike their own parents, Charlie and Darcy were supportive of their daughters’ ambitions and dreams.