“And what am I supposed to do?” he asked, looking unhappy as they took off their coats and hung them up in a closet in the front hall. “Ask you for an allowance, or money for the newspaper every day? I’m fucked without a contract.” He sounded bitter about it, as they walked slowly upstairs together, but at least he was no longer angry at her. Things were a little better.

“If you finish the book, they’ll give you another contract,” she tried to reassure him.

“I’m two books behind, Hope. Not one.” At least he was being honest about it now.

“How did that happen?”

He smiled ruefully and shrugged. “Having too much fun before I met you. At least now I have more time. I just don’t feel like working. I want to be with you all the time.” She knew that, but he had also just had three weeks to work without her, and he hadn’t. He really needed to put his life back together. While she had been cleaning up his house, he had been doing nothing except hanging out with her.

“It sounds like you’d better get to work,” she said quietly.

“Do you still want to marry me?” he asked, and looked like a boy again as he said it, and she put her arms around his neck and nodded.

“Yes, I do. I just want to make sure that we’re both being grown-ups about it and have an honest relationship with each other, Finn. We really need that if we want this to work.”

“I know,” he said. The steam had gone out of him. He was so wonderful at times, and so unreasonable at others. And he had been mean, blaming Hope for the miscarriage, which made her feel awful every time, and was neither loving nor fair. “What do you say we go to bed and take a nap?” he asked, looking mischievous, and she laughed, and then ran up the stairs behind him, and a moment later, he locked their bedroom door, swept her up in his arms like a child, and tossed her into bed, where he followed her a moment later. He got no work done that afternoon, but they both had a great time, and the rift between them seemed to have been repaired. He wasn’t always truthful with her, but he was full of charm, and sexy beyond belief.

The following afternoon Finn drove her into Dublin to buy some more fabric and other things she needed for the house. She felt guilty taking him away from his work, but she still wasn’t comfortable driving in Ireland, and Winfred was a terrible driver, so Finn volunteered. The atmosphere between them was light and happy again, and they were both in good spirits. They had gotten everything they wanted in Dublin, and Hope was happy to see that Finn was in a good mood. That wasn’t always the case these days, and she had the feeling he was drinking more than he used to. And when she had checked with Katherine, she agreed, but Hope didn’t say that to Finn. She knew he had a lot on his mind, particularly with the lawsuit in New York and two books to write.

“You know, I was thinking,” he commented, as they headed toward Blessington on the two-lane road that ran through the Irish countryside. It still looked like a postcard to Hope, even on a cold November day. “It would make things a lot easier for me, and be less embarrassing for me, if we set up some kind of account that I could draw from, without having to ask you.” She looked startled as he said it, although it made sense. But they weren’t married yet, and it was a fairly bold request.

“What kind of account?” she asked cautiously. “How much are we talking about?” She could see his point, particularly in his current state of destitution. She assumed he meant a few thousand dollars for minor expenses. She could live with that, although it felt a little awkward to be discussing it. But they were almost married. She was still hoping to get him to wait till June now, but she hadn’t said that to him again, since he got so upset when she did before.

“I don’t know. I was trying to figure it out yesterday. Nothing crazy,” he said blithely. “A couple of million maybe. Like five, so I have some cushion and don’t have to ask you for every little thing I need.” She thought he was joking the way he said it, and she laughed. And then she saw the look on his face and realized that he meant it.

“Five million?” she asked, with a look of disbelief. “Are you kidding? What on earth are you planning to buy? The house only cost one and a half.” And she had spent that just to make him happy, to buy a house that, it turned out, had never belonged to his family after all.

“That’s the whole point. I don’t want to have to ask you for every penny, and then have to explain what I want to spend it on.” He sounded as though it made sense to him, and she stared at him incredulously, with a sinking feeling in her stomach.

“Finn, a spending account of five million dollars is insane.” She wasn’t angry, she was shocked. And he hadn’t hesitated to ask her for the money, as though it were a ten or a twenty floating around in her purse.

“With the kind of money you have?” Finn suddenly looked annoyed. “What the fuck is that about? Trying to control me by keeping the purse strings to yourself? Five million bucks is small change to you.” He wasn’t even being nice about it. It was as though everything between them had changed. Suddenly he wanted money, and he alternated between his old sweetness, and being angry and accusatory a lot of the time. This was not the Finn she had fallen in love with. It was a new one who upset her a lot of the time, and then would suddenly revert back to being loving again. But he did not look loving now. This was the new Finn in full bloom, with his hand up to his elbow in her purse. That was very new, and she didn’t like it at all.

“That’s a lot of money to anyone, Finn,” she said quietly. She was not amused.

“All right, make it four. If I’m going to be your husband, you can’t keep me on an allowance.”

“No, maybe not. But I’m not going to give you millions either, to blow however you want, or I’ll be out of money as fast as you are. I’d rather just pay the bills, the way I do now, and keep a few thousand in a petty cash account for you.” It was as far as she was willing to go. She didn’t want to buy him, and she was no one’s fool. She had learned a lot about handling money since her divorce.

“So you’re going to keep me on a leash,” he said angrily, narrowly missing a truck on a turn in the road, and his driving was scaring her. The road was wet and it was already dark, he was driving too fast, and he was furious with her.

“I can’t believe you’re asking me for five million dollars in an account for you,” Hope said, feigning a calm she didn’t feel.

“I told you, four would be fine,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I know you’re having money troubles, but I’m not going to do that, Finn.” She was offended that he had asked her, and even more so that he was insisting. “And when we get married, we’ll have to have a prenup.” She had mentioned it to her attorneys in New York several months before. They had already done a rough draft. It was relatively simple and said that what was Finn’s was his, and what was hers was hers. For obvious reasons, she didn’t want to commingle funds with him. Paul had given her that money, and she was keeping good track of it.

“I had no idea you were cheap,” he said bluntly, as he took another sharp turn in the road. It was an incredible thing for him to say to her, given what she had done for him with the house. He seemed to have forgotten very quickly her generosity with him. And she wasn’t cheap, she was smart. Especially given his newly discovered talent for telling lies. She was not about to turn her fortune over to him, or even a portion of it. Five million dollars was ten percent of what Paul had given her after twenty years.

They drove the rest of the way home in stony silence, and when he came to a sharp stop in front, she got out and walked into the house. She was extremely upset by his request, and he was even more so about her refusal. He walked straight into the pantry and poured himself a stiff drink, and she could already see the effect of it when he came upstairs to their room. She suspected he might even have had a second one by then.

“So what would you think is reasonable?” he asked her as he sat down, and she looked at him with a pained expression. Things were going from bad to worse. First his obsession with her getting pregnant, then the lying, and now he wanted a huge amount of money from her. Day by day he was turning into a different man, and then out of nowhere she’d get a glimpse of the old one, who had been so wonderful to her, and just as quickly he’d disappear again. There was something very surreal and schizophrenic about it, and she remembered his brother referring to him as a sociopath in the investigator’s report. She wondered now if maybe he was. She also recalled reading an article about something called “intermittent reinforcement,” where people were alternately abusive and loving, and their victims were so confused, they became more determined than ever to work things out. She felt like that now. Her head was spinning. His manipulations were a powerful magnetic force. It was almost as though his mask was slipping more and more and what she was seeing behind it was scaring her to death. She still believed that the good Finn was in there somewhere. But which one was real? The old one or the new one, or both?

“I’m not going to give you any money, Finn,” she said calmly, and then she saw that he had brought the bottle of scotch upstairs with him and poured himself another drink.

“You don’t think you can get away with that, do you?” he asked, turning nasty. “You’re sitting on fifty million bucks from your ex-husband, and I’m supposed to hang around, waiting for small change.” She had thought he was making a decent living, which would have solved the problem, but even if he wasn’t, she wasn’t about to start pouring millions of dollars into his accounts. It wasn’t right, and she didn’t want to buy a man. She realized too that he had complained about his expenses, sending Michael to college, and she wondered now if he paid for anything for his son, or if Michael’s grandparents were paying all his bills, and Finn was paying nothing.