Matters of the Heart

Finn invited her to dinner in Blessington that night. She agreed to go, for distraction in her despair, and for once not a single difficult subject came up. Not money, not babies, not weddings. She was depressed at first, and surprised that they had a good time together like in the beginning, and once again, it gave her hope. She was constantly ricocheting now between hope and despair. And she was having more and more trouble getting up each time she got knocked down. Ever since Paul had died, she was tired. And Finn was slowly beating her down.

But miraculously, for the next several days, just as she had begun to lose hope, everything seemed to be all right again. Finn was in a good mood. He was writing. She was starting a new book of photographs of Ireland, and enjoying some projects in the house. It was beginning to feel like the early days when she had first bought the house. And she tried to put out of her mind the outrageous things he’d said to her, and the money he had asked for. Just for now. She needed the respite. And then a letter came by FedEx from New York. She took it up to Finn and left it with him, and when he came out of his office again, he looked like a black cloud.

“Bad news?” she asked, looking worried. Given the expression on his face, it would have been hard to believe it was good.

“They’re telling me that even if I deliver the book now, they won’t publish it. They’re going ahead with the suit. Fuck. And this is one of my best books.”

“Then someone else will publish it, and you may get a better deal.” She tried to sound encouraging, but he looked incredibly angry.

“Thank you, Little Miss Cheerful. They want their money back, and I’ve already spent the advance.”

Hope put a gentle hand on his shoulder, as he poured himself a stiff drink and took a long sip. He felt better when he did.

“Why don’t you let me ask Mark Webber to handle this, and see if he can negotiate something for you.”

Finn looked at her then with fury. “Why don’t you just fucking write them a check?” She didn’t like the way he had spoken to her, but she didn’t say anything to him about it, and refused to react in kind. She didn’t want another fight.

“Because a good lawyer can make a deal, and then we’ll see what we have to do.” She was trying to reassure him, without committing herself. It was hard to know these days where things were going to go with them. She was still hopeful, but realistically, less and less. Things weren’t going well. It was all about greed now, getting his hands on her money, and covering up old lies. As it said in the Bible, their house was built on sand.

“Is that a royal ‘we’?” he asked her in a nasty tone. “Or are you going to pay up, and stop making me hang by the neck about it? I need money. And I want my own account.” She was already clear about that. He had been saying it for weeks.

“But we don’t know how much you need,” she said quietly. Hope always got quiet when she was upset, either angry or scared.

“That’s beside the point. If you want me to stick around, I don’t want to be accountable to you. What I spend, how much, and what I spend it on is my business, not yours.” And yet he wanted her money to do it, but figured it was none of her business. It sounded pretty ballsy, even to her. “Let’s be honest about this, Hope. You’re forty-five years old, not twenty-two. You’re a pretty woman, but forty-five isn’t twenty-five or thirty. You don’t have a living relative in the world, no siblings, no parents, no cousins even, your only child is dead, and the last person you considered yourself related to, your ex-husband, just died last week. So who do you think is going to be around, if something happens to you, you know, say if you got sick? And what do you think would happen if I walk out on you, maybe because I found a twenty-two-year-old? Then what happens to you? You wind up fucking alone, probably forever, and one day you die alone. So maybe what you need to think about, if you don’t want to put that money in an account for me, is what your life is going to look like ten years from now, or twenty, when no one else is around, and you’re all alone. Looking at it from that perspective, you just may want to give some serious thought to making it attractive to me to stick around.” As Hope listened to him, she looked like she’d been slapped.

“Is that supposed to be a declaration of love?”

“Maybe it is.”

“And how do I know, if I set up these accounts for you in the right amounts, that you actually will stick around? Let’s say I do that, for five or ten million, and whatever you want when we get married, and then you meet the perfect twenty-two-year-old.”