Matters of the Heart

“I’m not sure what to do about the house,” she said sadly. Making major decisions about anything was too hard for her right now. She was still too shaken by everything that had happened.

Robert looked at her quietly. She needed a guide to get through the dark forest of what she was going through. “The man threatened to kill you. That was not a story for a book, it was a message to you.” She had told Robert all about it.

“I know,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “He killed the woman’s baby too, so he could get all her money.” She spoke about them as though they were real people, which they had become to her, instead of an allegory for her, which she understood clearly in the end.

“I’d like to give him thirty days to pack up and get out. People like him always land on their feet again. They tell enough lies and screw over enough people, and the next thing you know, they turn up somewhere else,” Robert said. He was sure that Finn would too. “Can you live with that? Thirty days for him to figure out his plans and pack up.” Robert would have preferred to kick him out in twenty-four hours, but he knew that it would be too stressful for Hope to contemplate doing that.

“Okay,” she agreed.

“I’ll go out there and pack up your things sometime this week.”

“What if he follows you back here?” Hope asked, looking terrified again, and Robert thought about it. Hope knew he didn’t have Robert’s name or numbers, because he had torn up the piece of paper and thrown it away, and he was still text-messaging her to no avail. Robert still had her phone. He handed it to her later that day, and saw her reading all the frantic text messages from Finn, and when she turned it off, she cried. It was awful what loving a man like that did to another human being. He had gone through the same thing when he finally walked away from his wife. There was no other choice. They were people who had been stolen by aliens sometime in their youth, destroyed, turned into twisted machines, returned, and then walked the planet destroying other lives. They had virtually no conscience and no heart, and very sick minds.

Hope was afraid that Finn was combing Dublin for her, and Robert knew it was possible. There was no limit to what a sociopath would do to reclaim his prey. So she sent Robert shopping for her, and she gave him all her sizes. He came back with enough clothes to keep her going for a few days. She hadn’t decided where to go yet, but she knew that Finn might look for her in New York or Cape Cod. He would think nothing of getting on a plane to find her. And his text messages were getting increasingly desperate, alternating between threatening and loving. When a sociopath lost his prey, or any perpetrator, they went insane looking for them so they could torture them again. Robert had seen it all before. His wife had been similarly desperate, and the last time he had left her, he never went back. He wanted this to be the last time for Hope and she said it was. Whatever she still felt for him, she knew there was no other choice. She had barely come out alive. If he hadn’t killed her, she would have killed herself. She was certain of that. She remembered thinking about it on the last night, and knowing she had surrendered her soul to him, she would have welcomed death, or sought it herself.

Robert was bringing in food for her, and she was too afraid to leave the house. They were sitting in his kitchen eating dinner, when he gently asked her where she thought she might like to go. She’d had an idea all day, and since she didn’t want to go back to New York or Cape Cod yet, it seemed like it might be the right choice. She didn’t want to go to a strange city and hide. And there was no telling how long Finn would look for her or how desperate he would get. And she didn’t want to give herself the temptation of seeing him again. Every time she read his loving text messages to lure her back, her heart ached and she cried. But she knew that whoever was writing them was not the same man she would find if she went back. The mask was off for good, and as everyone who knew him had said, he was a dangerous man. He was everything they had described and worse.

She had Robert’s secretary make a reservation for her to New Delhi. It was the only place she wanted to go, and she knew she would find her soul again there, just as she had before. She wanted to hide, but she also needed to put herself back together again. She still shook violently every time she heard the phone ring, and her heart stopped every time Robert let himself into his home. She was terrified it would be Finn.