Matters of the Heart

“That’s not going to happen, Hope,” he said gently. “The man you saw in the beginning and fell in love with doesn’t exist. The real one is a monster, without a heart or a conscience. I could be wrong, of course, and he could just be a very troubled guy, but I think we both know what we’re seeing. That man in the beginning was an act he put on for you. That act is over. This is the third act, where the villain goes in for the kill.” It was the theme of everything Finn wrote. “You can go back and take another look to be sure, no one can stop you, but you could be putting yourself at risk. Maybe great risk. If you do go back, you’ve got to be ready to get out fast, and run like hell if you smell danger. You can’t stick around to negotiate with him. I don’t usually tell people this, but I’ve been there. I was married to an Irish girl, the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen, and the sweetest. I believed every word she told me, and her story sounds a lot like Finn’s. She had a miserable childhood, her parents were both drunks, and she wound up in foster homes where people did awful things to her. She had the face of an angel and the heart of a devil. I defended her on manslaughter charges a few years after I got out of law school. I had absolutely no doubt of her innocence then. She killed her boyfriend and claimed he tried to rape her, and there was evidence to support it. I believed her. I got her off, but today I wouldn’t tell you the same thing. Eventually, she left me, took every penny I had, broke my heart, and took our kids with her. I married her right after I defended her.

“Eventually she tried to kill me. She came back during the night and stabbed me, and tried to make it look like an intruder, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew it was her. And I still went back to her two more times, trying to make it work, ignoring everything I knew. I loved her, I was addicted to her, and all I wanted to do was save our marriage and keep my kids. She eventually kidnapped them to Ireland seven years ago, and by some miracle they needed someone to head up the Dublin office at the time, so I jumped at it, to be close to my kids. I couldn’t force her to come back to the States. She’s very clever, and thank God, my kids are okay. The youngest one just left for college in the States two months ago, and I’m going back to the New York office this spring. Nuala has married two men since me, both for money, and one of them died two years ago, from a medication he was violently allergic to, which she administered to him, and convinced the judge at the inquest that she didn’t. She inherited all his money. And she’s going to do it to the man she’s currently married to or some other guy one of these days. She has absolutely no conscience. She belongs in prison, but I don’t know if she’ll ever get there. She is so profoundly disturbed that she is willing to cross any line and has a deep need to get back at the world for what was done to her. No one is safe from her.

“So I know what you’re dealing with here, and I think I know how you feel. It took me years to understand that the good Nuala was only an act she put on for me, but it was so goddamn convincing that I always believed her, no matter what lies she told me or what awful things she did. The kids eventually moved in with me, which didn’t bother her. People like that don’t make terrific parents. Their children are either accessories to their crimes, or their victims. She doesn’t even see my girls now, and I don’t think she cares. She’s busy spending her late husband’s money, the guy she killed by giving him the wrong antibiotic out of the medicine chest. It stopped his heart cold as she knew it would, and she waited an hour to call the paramedics because she ‘was so upset’ and claimed she was sound asleep and didn’t hear him dying. And they believed her. No one has ever cried as hard as she did at the investigation. She was inconsolable. She married her defense attorney, again, and one of these days, she’ll do the same thing to him or someone else. But every man she’s ever left, except the dead ones, have mourned her. And so did I.