Danielle Steel - Matters of the Heart

She was still sobbing when they got to Dublin an hour later. He had driven more slowly on the way back. He was debating about taking her to the hospital to have her checked out, or take her to his home and sit her in front of the fire in a warm blanket. She still looked terrified and she hadn’t said a word. He had no idea what had happened, or what Finn had done to her, but she had no obvious injuries or bruises, except to her soul and mind. He knew it would be a long time before she felt whole again, but he knew from talking to her before that she would survive, and even recover, no matter how long it took. It had taken Robert several years.

He asked Hope if she wanted to go to the hospital, and she shook her head. So he took her home with him, and when they got there, he gently undressed her as he would have one of his daughters when she was a child. He rubbed her down with towels as she stood there and cried, handed her a pair of his pajamas, wrapped her in a blanket, and then put her in his bed. He had a doctor come by to look at her later that morning. And she was still looking wild-eyed, but she had stopped crying. All she said to Robert when the doctor left was “Don’t let him find me.”

“I won’t,” he promised. She had left everything there, and she had done what Robert had said. She ran like hell for her life, and she knew with total certainty that if she hadn’t, sooner or later, she would have died.

Robert waited until the next day to talk to her, and she told him everything that had happened. Every word that Finn had said. His pressure for the money. The outline of the story he had described to her, and the implications of it weren’t lost on Robert either. Finn had almost succeeded in getting everything he wanted, but the golden goose had run away during the night. Finn had started calling on her cell phone within hours of her escape. He woke up early in the storm and couldn’t find her, and when she didn’t answer her phone, he started sending text messages. He kept telling her he’d find her, that he wanted her to come home, at first that he loved her, and later when she didn’t respond, his messages were full of thinly veiled threats. Hope didn’t answer, and Robert finally took her phone so she didn’t have to see them. She shook violently every time one of them came in. Robert gave her his bedroom, and he slept on the couch.

And on the second day of her escape, he asked her where she wanted to go, what she wanted to do, and what her plans were for the house. She thought about it for a long moment. In some part of her she still loved the way Finn had been at the beginning, and knew she would for a long time. It wasn’t over yet. She would never forget or stop loving the man she had loved for the first nine months, but the demon he had become after that had nearly cost her her soul, and would have cost her life. She had no doubt of it now.

“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.

Her reservation to New Delhi was for the following night, two days after she had walked to Blessington in the early-morning snow. And listening to Hope tell him about the ashram over dinner, Robert thought it was a good idea. He wanted her as far away as possible from Finn. He was planning to go to Blaxton House himself after she left, and serve Finn with eviction papers. They were giving him thirty days to get out, and after thinking about it, Hope told him to sell the house. She never wanted to see the place again. It was too intimately linked to Finn. She knew she had to close that chapter of her life for good.