Matters of the Heart

by Danielle Steel

  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 thi
s 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 wan
ted 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.