She paused, looked at him, at the way the colour had drained from his face.
‘You’ve never failed, have you?’ she said, realisation crashing over her. ‘You’ve gone from one piece of good luck to another and never had to live with the consequences when it’s all gone wrong.’
‘Ha!’ Finn said with a laugh that didn’t sound at all genuine. ‘You don’t understand what you’re talking about, Madeleine.’
‘Sure I do. You’re the head of a huge company, in beautiful new offices. You have two beautiful children and this gorgeous home. You’ve got everything that you ever wanted. You can’t even imagine how I would survive if my plans didn’t work out first time. I mean, look at everything you’ve achieved.’ She watched him closely, trying to read his body language, his face. She had spilled more secrets to him than she’d ever thought she could, and now it was time to even the score.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said again, his voice lower, more dangerous. ‘You look around and see an apartment. I see failure. I see the house I should have been bringing my children up in, sold in the divorce because I couldn’t make my marriage work. It was gone. I didn’t even know—still don’t know—how my marriage disintegrated so fast. And my home was gone, and the business holding on by a thread. And I could so easily have lost everything. I still could.’
‘You’re terrified,’ she realised, looking at him, really seeing his life for the first time. Suddenly it all made sense. The drive, the ambition. ‘You’re terrified that all this is going to fail and you’ll lose everything.’ And he had been projecting all his worst fears onto her rather than face up to them. ‘You’re so afraid of failure that you can’t bear the thought that my plans might not work out, so you pumped my bank account full of money to make sure that won’t happen.’
‘That’s not it,’ Finn said. But she could read his face. His heart wasn’t even in the denial. That was exactly it.
‘Why are you so scared?’ she asked. ‘You have this apartment. You have your business. You could walk away now a rich man.’
‘I could, and then there could be another financial crisis and I could lose everything and the apartment would be gone and the kids... What would we do? I thought I was set for life. I thought the business was good and my home life was good and I thought I could see how the future was going to unfold. And then Caro told me that she was unhappy, that she was leaving, and it all fell away. I thought it was all secure, and it wasn’t. Not a single part of my life made it out of the divorce unscathed. And I can’t risk that again. I won’t.’
And there it was. This was what he was really afraid of—finding himself a hungry little boy again. Seeing his children live the same childhood that he had. She was hit by a wave of sympathy, taking the edge off her anger.
‘Your mother coped with worse,’ she reminded him, ‘and you turned out okay.’ Because, really, the huge chunk of money she hadn’t asked for aside, Finn was a decent guy and she knew his mother was proud of him.
‘She did. She coped. Every single day she worked two jobs, sometimes more, to keep barely enough food in the cupboard for me, and she coped. And that’s all she did. So that by the time that I had enough money for her not to have to work any more she was too worn out and tired to enjoy the benefits.’
‘And you’re frightened of ending up like her. I understand that. But you did it, Finn. You worked hard for her, and yourself, and you’re a million miles away from that life now. You’re not going to wake up one day and find yourself back there.’
‘But what’s the difference, really?’ he asked, looking haunted. ‘It’s the figures in my bank accounts. It’s not real money; it’s just numbers. It’s intangible. When Caro and I got divorced, that number halved. The house went. I nearly lost the business too. Anything could happen. The business could still fail. One of the kids could get sick. There are a million things waiting around the corner that will mean that all that work wasn’t enough and I’ll find myself back where I started. Where my mum started.’
‘Your marriage ended and that meant you’d failed. That’s what you think, right? You failed, putting everything at risk.’ She so had him sussed, and he was wrong, and she was going to make him see it. Not for herself, she told herself, but as a service to her friend. She had no interest in whether he was relationship material or not, because she absolutely didn’t want one herself. But she couldn’t let him go on with his life scared to start a relationship because he was convinced that he was going to lose everything. That he wouldn’t be able to cope if that happened. He was a good guy, and he deserved better than that.
‘Well, we’re divorced,’ Finn said eventually. ‘I don’t think we can call it a roaring success of a marriage.’
She rested her elbows on the countertop, leaning towards him in a challenge. ‘You could call it two people growing apart and making a positive decision for their future happiness.’
‘You could call it that, if you wanted to.’ Finn took a step backwards and she knew that her words had hit home. ‘I just see it for what it was. Something that should have been better. Something that would have been better, if I’d worked a little harder.’
She laughed, only stopping herself when she saw the hurt on his face. ‘You think your marriage ended because you didn’t work hard enough?’
‘That was part of it.’ He nodded.
‘And the other parts?’
‘What do the other parts matter?’ She was pressed up against the counter now and he had retreated to the other side of the room. He was on the run, but she was going to make him face up to this. He had put her in this position by putting that money into her account when she had specifically told him not to. She wasn’t going to hold off making him as uncomfortable as he had made her.
‘I imagine they mattered to Caro.’ He was the one with his arms crossed now. She saw the barriers he had thrown up and ignored them. This was too important. ‘Did you talk about it, when things started to go wrong?’ she asked.
‘Yes, of course, but by then it was too late. We wanted different things: I wanted to be settled here and she wanted something...more.’
Madeleine shrugged. ‘Doesn’t sound like there’s a lot you could have done about that.’
‘I could have tried to go with her.’
‘Was that what you wanted?’
He hesitated, looked thoughtful. ‘No.’
‘Then I can’t imagine it would have made for a fulfilling arrangement for either of you. Sounds like the decision to end the marriage was a pretty successful one for both of you. So why did it feel so scary? Was it the money?’
He shook his head. ‘We split things fifty-fifty. It was fair.’