#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In Danielle Steel’s powerful novel, four trauma doctors—the best and brightest in their field—confront exciting new challenges, both personally and professionally, when given an unusual opportunity.   Bill Browning heads the trauma unit at San Francisco’s busiest emergency room, SF General. With his ex-wife and daughters in London, he immerses himself in his work and lives for rare visits with his children. A rising star at her teaching hospital, UCSF at Mission Bay, Stephanie Lawrence has two young sons, a frustrated stay-at-home husband, and not enough time for any of them. Harvard-educated Wendy Jones is a dedicated trauma doctor at Stanford, trapped in a dead-end relationship with a married cardiac surgeon. And Tom Wylie’s popularity with women rivals the superb medical skills he employs at his Oakland medical center, but he refuses to let anyone get too close, determined to remain unattached forever.   These exceptional doctors are chosen for an honor and a unique project: to work with their counterparts in Paris in a mass-casualty training program. As professionals, they will gain invaluable knowledge from the program. As ordinary men and women, they will find that the City of Light opens up incredible new possibilities, exhilarating, enticing, and frightening.   When an unspeakable act of mass violence galvanizes them into action, their temporary life in Paris becomes a stark turning point: a time to face harder choices than they have ever made before—with consequences that will last a lifetime. Danielle Steel has been hailed as one of the world’s bestselling authors, with a billion copies of her novels sold. Her many international bestsellers include Happiness, Palazzo, The Wedding Planner, Worthy Opponents, Without a Trace, The Whittiers, The High Notes, 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; Expect a Miracle , a book of her favorite quotations for inspiration and comfort; Pure Joy , about the dogs she and her family have loved; and the children’s books Pretty Minnie in Paris and Pretty Minnie in Hollywood . 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 forl