Matters Of The Heart

Chapter 15

They went to London in October, but not to the fertility doctor. They stayed at Claridge’s, checked out the antique shops, and went to two auctions at Christie’s. Hope was a little taken aback when Finn bid on a spectacular armoire and a partner’s desk, each of which went for close to fifty thousand pounds. He had gotten carried away in the auction, and apologized profusely for it later when they went back to the hotel. He offered to sell them again at Christie’s, if she didn’t want to spend that much money. But she loved them too, so they went to pay for them the next day and she didn’t really mind, although she’d been stunned by the price at first. She had never bought furniture that expensive before. He was remorseful for the rest of the day. But they had gotten two beautiful pieces. They had them shipped home, and flew back to Dublin that night. It was a beautiful October night when they got there, and they were both happy to get home. The house was quiet and peaceful, and they figured out where they would put the new antiques. They agreed on everything. And the only damper to the evening was that she discovered she’d gotten her period, and Finn was bitterly disappointed. He got morose about it that night, and had too much to drink, and then he got angry at her and told her it was her fault she wasn’t pregnant, and she wasn’t trying. But there wasn’t much she could do, unless she started taking fertility drugs, which she didn’t want to do, and even the London doctor had said she didn’t need. He just had to be patient.

The following day she was relieved that he was in better spirits. He said his new contract had come from his publisher, for a hell of a lot of money. He signed it, and drove to the DHL office to send it, and then took her out for a nice dinner that night in Blessington. He said the contract was a major one for him, for three books. It put him in a festive mood, and he seemed to forgive her for not getting pregnant. That was becoming a major issue between them. It had been four months since the miscarriage, and he was more anxious than she was about it. But she was still ambivalent, and Finn wasn’t. He wanted a baby. Now!

Their new antiques arrived from London a few days later, and they looked fabulous when the movers placed them. Finn said they were worth every penny she had spent on them and she had to agree. And as they both knew, she could afford it.

She was talking to Mark on the phone the next day about the three shoots she had lined up for November, and the future show at the Tate Modern, and he made a comment about Finn.

“That’s too bad about his contract. He must be upset about it.” Hope was confused the minute he said it. They had celebrated his signing it only a few days before.

“What do you mean?”

“I hear they dropped him. He failed to deliver his last two books, and his sales have plummeted. I guess people think the subjects are too weird. They scare the hell out of me,” he added. “There was an article about it in The Wall Street Journal yesterday. They dropped him, and they’re even threatening to sue him to recover monies for the two books he didn’t deliver. It’s amazing how people can fuck things up for themselves, not having discipline and living up to their contracts.” Hope felt sick as she listened, and wondered if he was embarrassed again about what had happened. But he could have shared it with her, and celebrating a new contract was pushing it. She wondered what he had signed and sent back.

From what Mark was saying, it certainly wasn’t a new contract. Maybe it was legal papers. Or nothing. She didn’t want to admit to Mark that Finn hadn’t told her. And she never saw The Wall Street Journal in Ireland. Finn knew that, so theoretically, he was safe. She hardly read the papers at all, except the local ones. They were living in a bubble at the foot of the Wicklow Mountains. Finn had counted on that. But it was a pretty shocking story, and if it was true, she knew he must be in dire financial straits, and even more so if they sued him, which was probably why he hadn’t told her. He was like a kid hiding a bad report card from his parents. But Hope also realized this was far more serious. He was lying to her about what was happening in his life, not just the past. And all he wanted to talk to her about was getting pregnant.

She thought of something else then, and checked the bank records after she talked to Mark. Finn hadn’t paid the rent he owed her monthly since they bought the house in April. She didn’t care about the money, and she never mentioned it to him so as not to embarrass him, but it was a clear sign that he was having money troubles and hadn’t told her. She knew that if he had the rent money, he would have paid. And he hadn’t. She had never thought to check, since it was just a token payment anyway.

She used it as a way of opening the topic of conversation that night, and asked him if everything was all right, since she had noticed that he hadn’t paid his rent. He laughed when she asked him.

“Is my landlady getting impatient?” he asked as he kissed her, and sat down to dinner with her in the kitchen. “Don’t worry about it. The signing money for my new contract should be here in a few days.” He didn’t tell her how much it was, but her heart sank. He was lying to her again. She didn’t know whether to be angry with him, or frightened, but his ability to skirt the truth, distort it, or just fabricate it, was beginning to unnerve her, and a red flag went up in her head. She didn’t ask him about it again, but he had just flunked the test, and it remained an obstacle between them for the next several weeks while she worried about it, and then packed for her trip to New York.

Finn walked in while she was closing her suitcases and instantly looked like an abandoned child.

“Why do you have to go?” he asked petulantly, as he pulled her onto the bed with him. He wanted her to stop and play, and she had a lot to do before she left in the morning. But she was upset with him anyway. He still hadn’t told her the truth about his contract, and if everything Mark said was true, his current publishing situation was disastrous. He was still working on his book, but she had never realized, when she saw him do it, that he was already two books late. He never told her, and seemed almost cavalier about it. It was stressful for her knowing he wasn’t telling her the truth, and she didn’t want to confront him yet again. His publishing life really wasn’t her business, but knowing he was truthful was important to her. And for the moment, he clearly wasn’t. “I want you to cancel your trip,” Finn said as he held her down on the bed and tickled her. And in spite of herself, she laughed. He was like a child sometimes, a big, beautiful boy, but he was also lying to his mommy, and they were man-sized lies and getting bigger. The current one was huge. And she was sure that he was lying to her out of shame. There had never been any real competition between them. They both had successful careers, in different fields, and were stars in their own right. But if he had been fired by his publisher and was getting sued, it put him at a disadvantage, and probably hurt his ego, in the face of her steady, solid, constantly rising career. She didn’t know what to say, and he wasn’t talking about his publishing problem at all.

“I can’t cancel my trip,” she told him. “I have to work.”

“Fuck it. Stay here. I’m going to miss you too much.” She almost asked him to come with her, and then realized that she needed a break. They were always together. And it was hard to work with him around. He needed constant attention, and wanted her to himself. That was fine at the house in Ireland, but it was impossible when she was trying to work in New York, and she was actually looking forward to a few weeks in her SoHo loft. She had promised Finn she would be back in Ireland by Thanksgiving, which was three weeks away.

“Why don’t you finish your book while I’m gone?” The weather was depressing in Ireland that time of year, and it sounded like he needed to do that. Maybe it would keep him from getting sued by his publisher. She had looked up the Wall Street Journal article on the Internet after talking to Mark Webber, and the situation sounded frightening to her. In his shoes, she would have been panicking, and perhaps he was, and so hiding it from her to save face. They were suing him for more than two million dollars, and interest, three million in all. It was a very, very big deal, and he had no way to pay for it, she knew, if he lost. Fortunately, the house was in her name. She had thought of putting it in his, and was planning to as a wedding present, but now she was glad she hadn’t, and she would keep it in her name if he was still being sued by the time they got married. But she was feeling uneasy about the marriage too. He had told too many lies, and it was hard to put it out of her mind. She also knew how unusual it was for a publisher to sue an author, and not handle it behind closed doors. They had to be truly furious with him to have it go that far.

Finn was in a black mood the next day when he took her to the airport, and for the first time since she had met him, she was relieved when the plane took off. She put her head back against the seat and spent the rest of the flight trying to figure out what was happening. She was feeling confused. Most of the time, he was the most lovable man she had ever known. But then there had been his viciousness when she lost the baby, his anger, and blaming her unfairly. His obsession with getting her pregnant again, his sudden willingness to spend her money, the lie he had told her about owning the house, the one about bringing up Michael, and now this huge mess he was in with his publisher that he hadn’t said a word about. There was a knot in her stomach the size of a fist, and she was relieved to get back to her comfortable apartment and her own life, just for a few weeks. She suddenly needed space and air.

It was too late to call him when the flight got in, and for once she was relieved about that too. Their exchanges seemed dishonest to her, because there was so much he wasn’t saying, and that she couldn’t say, because he had no idea what she knew. The dream was turning into a nightmare, and she needed to sort it out before it irreparably destroyed what they had.

She had given herself two days to get organized before she had to do the first shoot, and she went to see Mark Webber the next day. He was surprised to see her in his office. She never dropped in without calling first, and he could see she was upset. He led her into his private office and closed the door behind him. She sat down across the desk from him, and looked at him with worried eyes.

“What’s up?” Mark always cut to the chase, and so did she. She didn’t beat around the bush. And she was way too worried to do so now.

“Finn never told me about the lawsuit with his publisher, or the canceled contract. In fact, he told me he just signed one, which is apparently bullshit. I think he’s embarrassed to tell me, but it makes me nervous when people do that.” Listening to her made Mark nervous too. He had always been uneasy about Finn. He had only met him once or twice. He thought he was very charming, and a little slick. “I’ve never done this in my life,” Hope said, looking apologetic. “But is there some way we could get some kind of investigation, to tell us everything, past, present, whatever? Some of it is none of my business, but at least I’d know what’s true and what isn’t. Maybe there are other things he’s not telling me. I just want to know.” Mark nodded, and he was relieved to hear her say it. He had always meant to suggest it to her, ever since she said she was in love with him and planning to get married. Mark thought an investigation was a good idea in some circumstances, and in her case essential.

“Look, Hope, you don’t need to apologize to me,” he reassured her. “You’re not being nosy, you’re being sensible. You’re a very rich woman, and I don’t care how nice the guy is, you’re a target. And even the nicest guys in the world run after money. Let’s just find out what kind of shape he’s in, and what he’s done with his life.”

“He doesn’t have any money,” Hope said quietly. “Or at least, I don’t think so. Maybe he does. I just want to know everything, right from the beginning. I know he grew up in New York and Southampton, and then he moved to London. He has a house there, and he moved to Ireland two years ago. The house we live in was his great-great-grandfather’s. And he was married about twenty-one years ago, he has a twenty-year-old son named Michael. His wife died when Michael was seven. That’s about all I know. Oh, and his parents were Irish. His father was a doctor.” She gave Mark Finn’s date of birth. “Do you know someone who could check all this stuff out, so no one ever knows?” It was still embarrassing for her to be prying into the life and history of someone she loved as much as Finn, and wanted to trust. She had in the beginning, but less so now, because of his lies. Finn had an explanation for each one, but she was uneasy about it.

“I know the perfect guy for this. I’ll call him myself,” Mark said quietly.

“Thank you,” she said, looking miserable, and a few minutes later, she left Mark’s office, feeling overwhelmed with guilt. She felt terrible for the rest of the day, especially when Finn called and told her how much he loved her and how miserable he was without her. He said he almost wanted to get on a plane and come to New York, but she reminded him gently that she had to work. She was even nicer to him than she would have been normally because she felt so guilty about what Mark was doing on her behalf. But Mark was right, it was smart. And if they didn’t find any skeletons in his past, or problems, except the lawsuit, Hope knew she didn’t need to worry and could marry Finn in peace. It was getting down to the wire, and they had been talking about getting married on New Year’s Eve, less than two months away. She wanted to know before that that everything was fine. And nothing was feeling good to her right now. Her instincts were screaming, and she was feeling sick and stressed.

Hope found it unbelievably hard to work the next day. She was nervous and distracted, and couldn’t make a decent connection with her subject, which was unheard of for her. She finally forced herself to concentrate with enormous effort, and she managed to do the shoot, but it wasn’t one of her best days. And the rest of the week was pretty much the same. Now that she knew someone was checking on Finn, she wanted to get the information, deal with it, and put it behind her. The suspense was killing her. She wanted everything to be all right.

And that weekend she went to Boston to see Paul, who was in the hospital at Harvard. He had caught a bad respiratory flu on the boat, and they were afraid of pneumonia. The captain of his boat had arranged to have him sent to Boston by air ambulance, which had probably saved him.

Paul was doing better but not great, and he slept through most of Hope’s visit. She sat next to him, holding his hand, and now and then he opened his eyes and smiled at her. It was painful to think that he had once been a vital man, brilliant in his field, full of life in every way, and now it had come to this. He looked so old and frail, and had just turned sixty-one. His whole body was shaking. And at one point, he looked at her and shook his head.

“I was right,” he whispered, “you wouldn’t want to be married to this.” As he said it, tears filled her eyes and she kissed his cheek.

“Yes, I would, and you know it. You were stupid to divorce me, and it cost you way too much money,” she teased him.

“You’ll have the rest pretty soon, except for what Harvard gets.” He could barely speak, and she frowned as she listened to him.

“Don’t say that. You’re going to be fine.” He didn’t answer, he just shook his head, closed his eyes, and went to sleep. She sat with him for hours, and flew back to New York that night. She had never felt so lonely in her life, except when Mimi died, and then she had had him. Now she had no one, except Finn. She tried to talk to him about it on the telephone the next day.

“It was so sad seeing him that way,” she said as her voice trembled, and tears rolled down her cheeks, which she wiped away. “He’s so sick.”

“Are you still in love with him?” Finn asked coldly, and Hope just closed her eyes at the other end of the phone.

“How can you say that?” she asked him. “For chrissake, Finn. I was married to him for twenty years. He’s the only family I have. And I’m all he has.”

“You have me,” Finn answered. Everything was about him.

“That’s different,” she tried to explain to him. “I love you, but Paul and I share history, and a child, even if she’s not here anymore.”

“Neither is ours, thanks to you.” It was a cruel thing to say, but he was jealous of Paul, and wanted to hurt her in whatever way he could. It was a side of Finn that she deplored. And telling her that the miscarriage was entirely her fault didn’t make it true. It just made him seem mean. It wasn’t a part of him she loved, although there were many other parts that she did. He was wonderful to her in many ways.

“I have to go to work,” she said, cutting him off. She didn’t want to get into discussing the miscarriage with him again, or his jealousy of Paul, particularly now. If he was going to be foolish about that, it was his problem, not hers. It was very disappointing to hear him talk to her that way.

“If I were that sick, would you be there for me?” He sounded like a child as he asked.

“Of course,” she answered, sounding bleak. Sometimes his bottomless pit of need was impossible to fill. She felt that way right now.

“How can I be sure?”

“I just would. I’ll call you tonight,” she said, glancing at her watch. She had to be uptown in half an hour.

When she got there, it was another long, hard day. She was in a terrible mood. Finn seemed to be upsetting her constantly all of a sudden. He was unhappy that she was away, and said his writing wasn’t going well. And Hope was waiting to hear from the investigator Mark had hired, and nervous about what he was going to say. She hoped that everything would be okay. It didn’t make up for the fact that Finn was lying to her about his current publishing situation, but at least if everything else was in order, she could tell herself that he was reacting badly to a difficult situation. That would be forgivable at least.

She didn’t hear from Mark until the end of the week. The investigator had been told to send the information through him. Mark called Hope on Friday afternoon. He asked her if she could come to his office, he said he had some files and photographs to share with her. He didn’t sound particularly happy, and Hope didn’t ask him any questions until she got to his office. She was nervous all the way uptown. Mark’s face gave nothing away until they sat down. And then he opened the file sitting on his desk, and handed a small ragged photograph to her. His face was grim.

“Who’s that?” Hope asked him as she stared at it. It was a photograph of four little boys, and the photograph was yellowed and tattered.

“It’s Finn.” When she turned it over, she saw that there were four names on the back. Finn, Joey, Paul, and Steve. “I’m not sure which one he is.” All four were wearing cowboy hats, and they looked very close in age. “It’s him with his three brothers.” As Mark said it, Hope shook her head.

“Someone made a mistake. He’s an only child. It must be a different O’Neill. It’s a pretty common name.” That much she knew was true. Mark just stared at her, and then read down the page. “Finn was the youngest of the four boys. Joey went to federal prison and is still there for hijacking a plane to Cuba a hell of a long time ago. Before that, he was on parole for bank robbery. Nice kid. Steve was killed by a hit-and-run driver when he was fourteen, somewhere on the Lower East Side where they lived. Paul is a cop, in the narcotics division. He’s the oldest. He gave the investigator this photograph. We promised to get it back to him. Their father died in a bar fight when Finn was three. He was a jack-of-all-trades. The mother, according to Paul, was a maid for some fancy people on Park Avenue, and she and the four boys lived in a one-bedroom walk-up apartment in a tenement on the Lower East Side. The boys slept in the bedroom, she slept on the couch in the living room. I think her name was Lizzie. She died of pancreatic cancer about thirty years ago, when the kids were still young. Apparently, they went to hell in a handbasket. Pretty shortly thereafter, Finn and one of the others were in foster care, and Finn ran away.

“He worked as a longshoreman when he was about seventeen, after their mother died, but his brother says he was always the smart one and told a hell of a good story. He’s been doing just that ever since, and making a nice living at it, until recently.” Mark looked at the file in front of him with blatant disapproval as Hope listened in painful silence. He hated doing this to her, but she had wanted the information, and now she had it. Just about nothing Finn had told her about his early life was true. Yet again, he had been ashamed to tell the truth, in this case about his humble and rocky beginnings compared to hers. She felt deeply sorry for him and what Mark had described of Finn’s youth. “His brother says he did manage to go to City College, and after that he never saw any of them again.

“Their mother named him after some Irish poet, which I suppose was prophetic. He says she was kind of a dreamer, and always told them fairy tales before they went to sleep, and then drank herself into oblivion on the couch. She never remarried, and it sounds like she had a pretty miserable life and so did they, you have to feel sorry for them.” He handed her a photograph of Finn then when he was about fourteen. He was a handsome boy, and it was clearly Finn. He didn’t look that much different now, and the face was the same. “There was no money. Eventually, their mother lost her job and she was on welfare, until Paul could help her on his policeman’s salary. But that couldn’t have been easy, since he was already married and had kids himself.

“Their mother died in the charity ward of a welfare hospital. They never had a dime. There was no apartment on Park Avenue, no house in Southampton. No father who was a doctor. Their grandparents came from Ireland, via Ellis Island, and if there is any ancestral tie to the house you’re living in in Ireland, Paul O’Neill knows nothing about it, and strongly doubts it. He said their grandparents and great-grandparents were potato farmers who came to this country during the Great Famine, like a lot of other people, but they would never have owned a house like yours. After Finn was a longshoreman, he seems to have done a lot of things, waiter, chauffeur, doorman, barker at a strip joint. He drove a truck and delivered papers, and I guess he started writing fairly young and sold some stories. After college, his brother doesn’t know a lot about what happened to him. He thinks he got some girl pregnant and got married, but he doesn’t know who she was and he never saw the kid. He hasn’t been in touch with him for years.

“And according to the investigator, Finn is in deep shit financially. He’s in debt up to his ears, he’s had a number of bad debts, and his credit rating is a disaster. He declared bankruptcy, which is probably why he eventually went to Ireland. He doesn’t seem to be able to hang on to money, although he’s made a fair amount with his writing in recent years. But now his publishers are pissed at him, so that’s gone up in smoke too. It sounds like the best thing that ever happened to him was walking into you a year ago. And let me tell you, this is going to be one hell of a lucky sonofabitch if he marries you. But I don’t think I’d say the same for you.

“There’s nothing wrong with his background, or with having been born poor. A lot of people have come up from situations like that and made something of themselves. That’s what this country is all about. And you have to admire the guy for crawling out of a pit like that. His credit is a mess, but that’s not the end of the world, if you want to help him with it. What I don’t like,” Mark said, looking over the file at her, “is that he lied to you about damn near everything. Maybe he’s ashamed of where he comes from, which is sad for him. But marrying a woman and claiming you’re someone and something you’re not doesn’t show much integrity on his part, and it’s none of my business, if you love the guy, but I don’t like the smell of it for you. The guy is a first-class liar. He’s invented a whole history for himself, including aristocratic ancestors, titles, doctors, and an entire world of people who don’t exist. Or maybe they do, but if they do, or did, none of them are related to him, which frightens me.”

He handed Hope the file without further comment, and she glanced through a neatly typed, fully documented report by the private investigator. Mark told her they were searching further, and promised additional information on his background in the next two weeks. But they seemed to have been very thorough so far, and as Hope looked back at Mark, she felt sick. Not because what she had heard was terrible, or unacceptable, but what she knew now was that Finn had lied to her about every fact and detail. It made her heart ache to think about it. He had had a miserable childhood in a walk-up tenement apartment, with a drunken mother, a father who had died in a bar fight, and he had wound up in foster care, which must have been nightmarish for him too. And instead of trusting her and sharing it with her, he had invented a mother who was allegedly a spoiled Irish aristocratic beauty and a father who was a Park Avenue doctor. It was no wonder he clung to her like a lost child every time she walked two steps away from him. After a childhood like that, who wouldn’t? But the problem was that he had lied to her about so many things. It made her wonder what else he had lied about, and what secrets he was keeping from her. He hadn’t even told her that his publisher had fired him and was suing him. So he was continuing to lie to her right up to today. There were tears brimming in her eyes as she looked at Mark across the desk.

“What are you going to do?” Mark asked her gently. He felt sorry for her. After a man like Paul, she had fallen into the hands of Finn. Mark knew she was in love with him, but his fear for her was that Finn O’Neill might be hiding something worse. And Hope was afraid of that too. She had had eleven glorious, exquisitely happy, fabulous months with him, with the exception of the miscarriage and his reaction to it. But other than that, everything had been loving and great. And now their whole life seemed to be unraveling, and Finn with it. It was extremely depressing.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said honestly. “I have to think about it. I’m not sure what this means. I don’t know if he’s too embarrassed to admit how he grew up and is trying to save face, which isn’t admirable, but maybe I could live with. Or if he’s a profoundly dishonest person.” Mark suspected that that was more likely, and even that he was after her for the money. In Finn’s current situation, that seemed easy to believe, and the same thought had crossed Hope’s mind too. She wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, and believe the best of him. She loved him. But she didn’t want to be blind and foolish either. She had wanted this information, now she had it, and she had to digest it and come to her own conclusions. And she didn’t want to say anything to Finn. She didn’t want to hear any more lies from him. It would only make the situation worse, until she figured out what to do.

“They don’t have anything yet on Finn’s marriage. They know the woman’s name, and the dates and circumstances seem to coincide with what you said. So maybe he told the truth about that, and not his childhood. They’re doing some more investigating, and verifying her cause of death. You said it was a car accident. The investigator said he’d have that for us by next week, or at worst by Thanksgiving.”

“I’ll be back in Ireland by then,” she said sadly.

“Be careful, Hope,” Mark warned her. “Be cautious about what you say to him. There’s a possibility that even if you love him, you don’t know who and what this man is. He’s probably just a very creative liar, which is what makes him such a good writer. But there’s always the possibility that he could be something far worse. You never know with people. Don’t corner the guy and stick this stuff in his face. Use it for yourself, to make a good decision. But be very, very careful how you handle him. You don’t want to wake up a sleeping demon. For what it’s worth, his brother says he’s a sociopath. But he’s not a shrink. He’s just a cop who has a crazy brother. And remarkably, no one has ever blown Finn’s cover, not even his brother, which is amazing. Paul O’Neill says Finn would lie about the time of day. It certainly looks like it from all that, although most of it is harmless. It’s just sad. Just be very careful you don’t help him turn it into something worse. If you embarrass him with this, he could get very nasty with you.” He was seriously worried about her, particularly after reading everything he had. His suspicion was that Finn O’Neill was a pretty sick guy, and it was hard to believe, under the circumstances, that he wasn’t after her money. And he had her to himself, far away in Ireland, in a big, deserted house in the countryside. Mark Webber didn’t like it at all.

“The sad thing is that until now no one’s ever been as nice to me. He’s the sweetest person on the planet, except for once or twice when he got mad. But generally, he’s a kind, loving, lovable guy.” And she had believed every word he said.

“And a pathological liar, from the sound of it. If you corner him, even accidentally, he may not be so nice.” Hope nodded. She was well aware of it herself, and he had been vicious to her about the miscarriage, which for some reason he took personally, as though she had lost the baby on purpose to hurt him. She wondered if that was what he thought, although it was beginning to occur to her that her having his child would give him a far more powerful claim on her. It was hard to know his motivations anymore, or where the truth lay. “I want you to do something for me, Hope. The law firm we use at the agency has a Dublin office.” He smiled then. “Every writer who wants to stop paying income tax moves to Ireland, so about a dozen years ago, the firm opened an office there.

“I checked with them this morning. The man running the Dublin office now worked with us for several years in New York, and he’s a good solid man, and an excellent attorney. I got his phone number this morning, and his cell phone, and they’re going to contact him and give him your name. He may even have done some work for you while he was here. He’s American and his name is Robert Bartlett. If you have any kind of problem, I want you to call this guy. And you can always call me. But I’m a lot farther away. He could drive down from Dublin anytime you want to see him.” As soon as he said it, Hope shook her head.

“Finn would have a fit, and he’d be suspicious. He’s jealous of everyone, and if this guy is under a hundred, Finn would go insane.” Mark wasn’t reassured by what she was saying, but handed her his numbers anyway from the notepad on his desk.

“I think he’s somewhere in his forties, if it matters. In other words, he’s not a kid, nor some doddering old guy. He’s a nice, sensible, grown-up, savvy, respectable guy. And you never know, you may need his help one day.” Hope nodded, hoping that she wouldn’t, and tucked his numbers into the inside pocket in her purse.

It hadn’t been a happy meeting and Mark was sad to see her leave, particularly in these conditions. She was in the middle of a messy situation, with a man who was a loose cannon, dishonest at best, and she had some difficult decisions to make. He didn’t sound dangerous to Mark, from everything Hope had said, but it wasn’t going to be pleasant for her dealing with it. He hated knowing she was so far away.

“I’ll be okay,” she reassured him, and then thought of something before she left. “Be careful if you call me. I’m going to leave this file in a locked drawer in my apartment. I don’t want Finn to find it. And please don’t refer to it if you call.”

“Of course not,” he said, looking equally unhappy.

Hope cried all the way back to her apartment in the taxi. Her heart was breaking over Finn’s many lies. She felt sorry for the awful childhood he had endured. But his lying was so extreme. She had no idea what she was going to do.