The Story of the Man who had Two Hearts

I heard a story once, about a man who had two hearts. One for everyday, and one for best.

His name was Hennessey, this man, in the story. I can't remember where I heard it, or who from. Out on the road somewhere, probably, or in a bar. It would have been a bar, I think. One of those places that closes slowly, when the night is done. While the staff are wiping down and closing up the register, there's always one table at the back that still has folks around it. Not one person in the place could give you a reason why they haven't been kicked out yet, not one that made any sense in the daylight. Daylight's hours away, though, and here they sit, in the slow, small hours. Swapping stories. Weaving tales.

The man, Hennessey, the one from the story, he had a wife who loved him, and a family. He had a job, and a boss, and workmates who liked him. He had a town that he lived in, friends that would have had his back, the respect of his community. None of these people knew his secret.

Having two hearts is a burden, as it was explained to me. It isn't like having a spare. They both of them, each of them, need looking after. Shut one up in a box for a year and you'll come back and find it a shrivelled thing, and realise then what's been the matter with you, why you've been feeling this way.

Each morning, Hennessey had to choose a heart. 

When he was a child, he changed hearts every day, as a matter of routine. Choosing the same heart two mornings in a row would have been like wearing the same underpants. His mother taught him this, and her the only person left alive in all the world who knew this thing about him. She had brought him with her from the foreign countries of his birth, just her and him, travelling alone.

When her own heart failed her, the boy was only ten. He wept and begged her to take one of his in place of hers, but she was calm and promised him that indeed she would have, had such a thing been possible, but that as it was, impossible, there was no choice left but that he go on alone, but that he would carry her love with him always. That the part of her spirit that had gone into him when he was being made and grown inside of her, that part was now of him and her, and always would be. That flickering candle-flame passed downwards since the dawn of time, branching and dividing. That he was but a part of something greater, something more than mortal, and that so was she, and that the comings and goings of life, that seemed so merciless and brutal, were not in truth as cut and dried as they appeared.

The people of the town where she had settled them had grown to love her, while she'd been alive. One woman more than most, named Maeve, had seen how special and precious she was. We shall not say that Maeve had given her her heart, for such metaphors might be confusing, in a story such as this. Let us merely say that Maeve was also cut souls-deep by grief at her passing, and that the boy lived with Maeve after his mother's death, just as they had before that, and that she raised him, she who understood his pain more keenly than any other could.

By this point, fate had seen fit to complicate the boy's morning routines. It just so happened, quite by chance, that the heart whose turn it had been on the day when he had first learned of his mother's illness was also the heart whose turn it had been on the day when his mother finally left him. His two hearts no longer looked the same, or felt the same. One was slightly twisted, slightly duller, than it's twin. They were still all but identical. An unfamiliar eye would have seen no way to tell them, one from the other, were it the case that an unfamiliar eye would ever see them, which it was not. But the boy could tell them apart now, as he never could have done before.

It was a tiny thing, this change, this difference, but the boy was in pain, and not the kind of pain that ever truly goes away. He was torn and broken, shattered by his grief. His mother had told him that he must go on, and he would not disappoint her, but he could bring no joy to that going, nor conceive of ever doing so again. Anyone, in his place, would be forgiven for grasping onto tiny changes. A straw floats, and a floating thing catches the eye of someone drowning.

The boy took it into his head that one of his hearts was lucky.

For a boy who had two hearts, and chose a different one each day, like underpants, the idea that one of them was lucky, one unlucky, was a problem.

He was careful to still choose each heart roughly evenly, but no longer did he simply alternate as he'd been taught to. He chose the heart he wanted for the day ahead of him.

There is a secret truth, about all of our lives, that not all of us admit to ourselves. All of our lives contain days which do not turn out as we expected. Left field days. Days that are surprisingly wonderful, or suddenly life-wrenchingly awful with no warning. No way to see it coming. That is not the secret. The secret is that, in a normal year, most lives contain barely a dozen of such days. The secret is that most days, almost every day, when you wake up, you can already tell roughly how good a day you're going to have. And you're normally right.

The boy chose the heart he wanted for the day ahead of him. And he was normally right.

The boy was ten, when he first made this change. By the time he was sixteen, his two hearts were very different things. On a good day, he would be a happier and more carefree young man than ought to have been possible. He had good friends. He lived a good life. He was still recognisably the same child that he had always been. He still bore his scars, and had forgotten nothing of his past, but he bore that weight with a kind of grace that lifted those around him with it. He lived a life that could contain within its future at least the possibility of hope.

On a bad day, none of these things were true. 

Most often he spent bad days alone, sometimes in his room, sometimes in the woods outside of town. On the bad days he was not alone he still had friends, but not good friends.

And then, one very bad day, he almost died. It just so happened, quite by chance, that he was not alone that day. The people he was with were not good friends, but they were friends. They got him to a hospital.

After that day, everything changed. He was in hospital for almost a week, and when he came out, he did the thing that he had considered doing, again and again, so many times over the years, but had always been too scared to actually commit to. He reversed his morning choices. If the day was to be dark, he pulled it upwards. If the day ought to be wonderful, he brought his darkness to it. He healed his bleaker self, slowly, gradually, day by day by day, knowing that he was sacrificing his own happiness to achieve this. Knowing that price, and paying it.

One year to the day after he almost died, Hennessey looked at his two hearts and was satisfied. What he had done could never be completely reversed. He would always be able to feel the difference between them, as long as he lived. But the year had done its work, and he felt a safe distance now from both his worst and his best. From that day on, he returned to the rules his mother had taught him as a child. Strict alternation. Underpants.

The story that I heard, the story of the man who had two hearts, never said much about Hennessey's support structure in his late teens, during the year when he was turning his life around. If one believed that story, one would have to believe that he was fighting these battles entirely alone, yet you and I must know that such a story would be incomplete.

It had to have been true in some sense, yes. He must have fought this fight alone. He was fighting to restore balance to his hearts, after all. Who could he turn to for support in this, when not another soul left living knew of them?

We all have battles that we fight alone, but that has never meant we are without support. A knight in the lists must be alone, no comrade rides beside him, but without support, before and afterwards, how would he even strap his armour on, or hope to survive the wounds inflicted by each tilt.

We know from the story that Hennessey had once had friends, on his good days. I choose to believe that not all would have deserted him. I cannot believe that Maeve would not be standing by him, she who loved him like her own, she who knew the pain inside him as one knows the figure in a looking glass.

I point this out, the inevitable presence in his life of those that loved him, not to detract in any way from his achievements. I wanted to touch upon it, though, because it seemed important. The story that I heard, the story of the man who had two hearts, focused so exclusively on that one man that it seemed to somewhat miss the very point that it had tried to make.

To cut himself off from anyone who loved him, or might grow to - was that not the very thing that Hennessey had been attempting, on his bad days? To fail to mention those that loved him, in explaining how he turned his life around, would surely miss the point then, yes?

To those of you who feel that I'm meandering, that's true. I have allowed myself to be distracted, and the remainder of our story still awaits. So consider this aside as just an interlude, a chance to catch your breath, to look away, refocus, then return.

Shall we begin, again?

It is time to speak of Jennifer.

There was a girl named Jennifer, and she had been away. Her family had moved to China, where her mother came from, and she'd been gone for two whole years. Once upon a time, before they'd left, she had been a good friend to Hennessey, on his good days. Now she returned to find him altered, almost beyond recognition.

This was not entirely unexpected. She had kept in touch with other friends, while far away. She knew he'd had a breakdown, knew he'd almost died, knew he was getting better. What she hadn't known, as it turned out, was all the other changes, in her friends and in her town. The tiny changes, none in themselves much worthy of report, that gradually accrete and leave a girl returning to a place and finding it and all its people gone and in their place imposters.

Hennessey, who she'd expected to find difficult to cope with, to adjust to, turned out in fact to be the only thing in this strange replica of her old home that did make sense. His change she could understand, forgive, and so quite unexpectedly she found that she would seek him out, who had been just a friend to her before among so many others.

It seemed to her that he too felt this, felt that some connection was there now between them. It seemed to her that when they were together in a group, he always had a kind of tension in him. When they were alone together, just the two of them, she seemed to feel some part of him relax. Perhaps because she'd not been there to see what he had been through, perhaps because he felt no guilt for things he might have said and done when he was ill. She'd been away, so nothing to forgive.

So they grew closer, as the months went past, and Jennifer adjusted to how different things were, and people, after just two years. They were friends, and neither of them looked for any more than that. She knew she might get carted back to China, as she thought of it. Her family had made it clear that they would love to up and leave, and take her with them, so just good friends was all she wanted then, from Hennessey.

It was her family, in fact, who helped her realise the truth. She got a voicemail from her father, telling her to eat at home that evening with them, that he had big news. It turned out later that the news was that they'd bought a dog, but in the hours before she knew that, Jennifer assumed that China beckoned, and that belief brought with it stabbing pain, quite unexpectedly. A howl of grief and loneliness and loss that tore at her and opened up her eyes to see the truth of things. She was in love with Hennessey. How could she not have not known? Whatever, she knew now, could not unknow it. Everything had changed.

Jennifer loved Hennessey.

Love is a tyrant. It cares not for convenience, spurns compromise, is wilfully unreasonable. Try as she might to calm her feelings down, they cried out to be known. She did her best to hide them, but she found that this meant having to avoid the very object of her rash affections. To be with him now, while still attempting to suppress her feelings for him, was like trying to keep her feet and stand in the middle of a tempest that only she could feel. A hurricane. To be in his company was to be buffeted by waves of joy and pain and passion. To stay away, though, that was desolate indeed.

So she resolved to tell him how she felt. She knew that he had no idea. How could he have, when she'd not known herself? She knew that if he spurned her she'd be hurt. No. Devastated. The idea terrified her. Each time she tried to put it into words, to let him know what she was going through, she faltered. In the end, exhausted, incoherent, she collapsed in floods of tears. Just fell to pieces and him sitting there across the room from her with not a clue as to what madness had got into her. Except he wasn't sitting there across the room. Now he was on the floor beside her, on his knees, his arms wrapped 'round her as she sobbed. And later, when they'd dried away their tears, she looked into his eyes and saw there that same love that was in hers, and knew that he could see the same, and they held each other tight, and all the words and truths came tumbling out of her, that she'd been scared to say.

A happy ending. Always a lovely moment, in a story. No ending, this, though. A beginning.

In that beginning, happily, Jennifer could look into Hennessey's eyes and see, that he loved her as much as she loved he.

Their love, their loves, long dormant in the seed, now sprouted and grew thick like summer vines. Rarely now were they apart, rather in constant contact. Walking, they were hand in hand. Sitting, they entwined on sofas, their attraction t’one another all too literal.

And they were happy. The days went by, the weeks, the months, and they were happy still.

And then one day, she caught him in a lie. He said he loved her, and she looked him in the eyes and found that she did not believe him. She was shocked, confused. She’d trusted him so deeply for so long now, that doubting him was like doubting herself, and in that moment of self-doubt, she doubted what she’d seen, or hadn’t seen. She did not speak of it to him, did not accuse. She told herself she was imagining.

Her mind was troubled, but she hid that from him, and he seemed to not have noticed, made no sign, showed no concern. That in itself disturbed her further, for the two of them were so attuned to one another that she’d thought he’d see her worry, hide it though she might. If he did, though, he kept it to himself.

She barely slept that night. Tossing and turning, tortured by phantoms of her own imagining. She brought him breakfast in the morning, kissed him, told him that she loved him. He told her that he loved her back.

"Do you really?" she asked, looking in his eyes.

He smiled, and set aside his breakfast, ran his fingers through his sleep-wrecked hair. He looked at her, and really looked. Food growing cold, ignored. He gave her all of his attention, grinned at her, kissed her lightly, told her that he loved her more than life, and she looked into his eyes, and she believed him.

Poor Jennifer. Poor Hennessey. How sad we feel for them now, you and I, now we both understand what’s going on. No happy endings here.

How tragic, that a man who had two hearts should have one of those hearts fall so in love with such a woman, so perceptive, so clear-sighted. Awful.

Hennessey and Jennifer, they did not last another year. The doubt was in her, and he could not fool her, did not truly want to, in the end. 

Before that end, well, torture, months of deepening pain. Let us not tell that story, but pass on.

There’s just one thing to mention, as we leave this chapter. One twist. One false assumption that you may have made.

The heart that loved her? Not the one you thought.

We all of us tell stories about love. How it is found. How it is lost. Some lives know just one love, and some know many, and each one of those many can be just as deep, and just as true. There is no playoff between quantity and quality.

But there are stories, we've all heard them, of those people who find true love late in life. Those people, in those stories, say - I thought that I had loved, before, but now I see that I was wrong.

So there it is. Not all loves are the same. The existence of great love, and it does happen, contains the implication of those lesser loves, that seem as big as any other at the time, but that are not, in hindsight.

First love, in teenage years, as full of passion as it is, is rarely great love. It's training wheels. It's meant to be outgrown.

Hennessey's tragedy, then, was to have known true love, great love, so young, and to have had it fail.

The darker of his hearts loved Jennifer. He had not known that, ‘til she’d crumpled to the floor in floods of tears. Hearts can keep secrets from us, after all. But once he knew, that detonation deafened him. He was swept up completely in their passion, so it was a while before he realised the truth, that while his darker heart adored her more than life itself, his lighter heart did not.

Why? Well, who can say why? Perhaps his darker heart had fewer mem’ries of her from his life before. Perhaps his lighter needed just more time, to braid the bonds of friendship into something more, but never got it, swept up as they were.

But for whatever reason, it was done, and over. Hennessey was an old hand at what came next. When his life fell apart, it seemed appallingly familiar. He just fell back on well developed skills. One foot in front the other. One day and then the next, one at a time. Going through hell? Keep going.

And love? No. None of that please. Not for him. He nursed his wounds. He kept his head down. He survived.

Jen went away, to China first, then other places, never back to here. That was a blessing.

The man who had two hearts lived day to day, then week to week, then month to month. The pain of love was fading, as it does. He felt less hollowed out. A year went past, then two.

He needed to be careful with his hearts, and as more time went by he came to see that they must be protected from themselves.

His lighter heart, he knew, had seen great love, up close and personal, but been denied the feeling of it, in itself. It hungered for a great love of its own. He’d catch it eying up new candidates. Steadfast, he held it back, for he’d resolved to never love again.

He failed. Of course.

There was a woman, at the office where he worked, a friend of his who wanted to be more than just a friend. They had been out together many times, had eaten, drunk, seen movies, gone to clubs, but always only ever in a group. She’d asked him out, but he’d refused her, and he’d watched her moving on to other guys. She’d dated, flirted, trying to find the one, but nothing yet had truly clicked for her.

One evening, out together in a group, she drunkenly confessed to Hennessey that she was still hung up on him. He was her one who’d got away, the one that she compared these other boyfriends to, and found that they fell short. She loved him, unrequited though it was, and couldn’t seem to stop, and didn’t want to.

He drove her back to her place, when the night broke up, made sure she got to bed okay, then headed home. She’d propositioned him, but she was very drunk, and there are rules about such things.

But as the days went by, Hennessey found he couldn’t get her off his mind. He saw her in the office every day, and found himself imagining what she’d be like, to fall in love with. She was a beautiful young woman, and sweet natured. He’d known her long enough to know her flaws, but didn’t find they irritated him. They were endearing. She was away one week, on holiday, and life felt emptier. He missed her more than he’d expected to. When she returned, he felt his spirits lifted. She was the first person on his mind, when he woke up, the last before he slept. But still he kept it all inside, and did not speak of it to her. This was infatuation, it would pass.

When she was ill, he checked in on her, brought her soup. They started spending most weekends together, just as friends who liked each other’s company. And then one Saturday, they were both out of sorts, snappish and irritable, each with the other. Their day was sour, and ended with a blazing row, and in that row, provoked and furious, he angrily admitted to her that he’d fallen quite in love with her, and how that terrified him, and how he wasn’t ready but he couldn’t seem to stop, try as he might. His love for her was stronger now, it seemed, than all of his resolve to never feel that pain again.

But he was still the man who had two hearts. Both hearts did love this woman, but not equally. His darker heart could still remember Jennifer. It knew that what it felt here was a lesser thing. For a long while, though, it sought to persevere, settled for less, enjoyed the happiness and peace that it felt, lying in her arms.

This woman was not Jennifer, and did not have her sight. She could not look into his eyes and see the change in him, from each day to the next, and so they stayed together and were happy.

And when it ended, it was not from him. His hearts were resolute, persistent in their feelings for her. Hers though, altered, changed.

It was his first time, being fallen out of love with, and he was hurt and angry, furious, betrayed. He raged against her heart and, too, he raged against his own.

But next there came another new experience, his first time on the rebound. Distraught and lost, he poured out all his pain to someone else, a woman they both knew, only to find that she too was as recently betrayed. He'd never felt so instantly so strong a bond with someone. They spent a month or two together, passionate and doomed, falling out of bars and into beds until they finally calmed down and mellowed out, admitted this was just what they had needed, each of them, but that they needed it no more. They were the best of friends, long afterwards, a deeper more profound connection than their early passion. They had each other's backs, cried on their shoulders, slept together now and then, when both were lonely and both unattached. They loved each other, always, and with all their various hearts, but both of them knew well they needed more.

All through his twenties, Hennessey sought love. He knew that it would take a while, that he must persevere, but he had faith. He trusted that in time he'd find someone and both his hearts would love them. Differently, but equally.

He did what everybody does, tried to stay positive, tried to be open. Try as he might, though, few things ever lasted more than months.

In the early years, for all he had his ups and downs, he on the whole had faith that all would turn out well, in time. His two hearts were a problem, to be sure, and he knew that his search might yet be a long one, but that was just a numbers game. It might mean that he had to try and fail more times than other people, that it might take years, but try he would.

He may have had that numbers game in mind, when he then made the choice to leave his town and move into the city. He found it busy, dirty, loud, and yet it had an energy he loved. A buzz and bustle and a hungriness to match his own.

Each of his hearts sought earnestly for love, but all through those long years they never found a person who was right for both of them. One heart would always love them more, the other less.

"A part of me still loves you," he would say, as he broke up with them, and all too often it was all too true. This made things harder than they were for normal folks. His darker heart might fall for someone new, but when its lighter twin still carried feelings for the one before, well what chance was there, actually?

It wasn't always him that did the dumping, not by any means, and he was just as hurt as always, every time. A woman told him once that she would have to go away for several days, to clear her head and make her mind up who to choose. She did still love him, she assured him, but had also fallen quite in love with someone else. He was appalled. To love two people at a time, this was a problem that he'd thought his own. He felt a sense of ownership of such dilemmas, was aghast at her presumptuousness. He swore at her and stormed away, all ego and hypocrisy.

It just so happened, quite by chance, that one or other of his hearts would sometimes fall in love with men. There didn't seem to be a pattern to it, but then there never was, that he could see. If either of his hearts had had a type, it would have simplified his search, but as it was they both delighted in surprising him with people that they chose.

All through these years, he also did his best to lead a rich, full life, for he well knew that, if he let them, his two hearts would have his search for love be all he thought about. He needed more than that. And so he did those things that people do, had jobs and friends, played music, exercised. Two or three times a year he'd go back home and visit Maeve, the woman who had raised him from the age of ten, and he'd check in with friends, revisit stomping grounds. He told himself that he was more than just two hearts, alone. And sometimes he believed it.

One of the men that he once fell in love with, on their first night out, was very keen to be as open and as honest as he could. Some people simply walk away, he said, when polyamory is spoken of, even the queer ones. Hennessey stayed, and listened, and was quite intrigued. He spent the months they were together fascinated, and even thought he might have found an answer to his fundamental problem. These poly groups were open to the idea that a man might love two people at a time. Differently, but equally. As time passed, though, he began to see a flaw in that first vision. He did meet people in those groups who loved two others, to be sure, but each of those two they loved with their whole self. There were not split in half by it, but doubled. And having seen that, how then could he settle for a lesser love, or ask another to.

By the age of thirty four, poor Hennessey was quite demoralised, and so were both his hearts. He felt burned out, stopped dating, knew that love would come again, as always, and yet no longer thought of that with hope. Six months went past, six more, yet neither heart was stirred by anyone. Maybe that's it, he thought. Perhaps we're done.

He had friends, a good job in the city. He was happy. He hadn't thought that was enough, but maybe he'd been wrong.

Another six months passed, yet still something was missing. Something profound, more complex than mere loneliness.

Yet what could he do? Love could not be forced. It would happen, or would not. He hoped it would, but he was at a loss.

There was a space inside him, hollow, empty, like a vacuum jar in some old physics lab that's had the air sucked out of it. That first great love he'd known, with Jennifer, once formed and filled that space, pushing his organs outwards to make room. And there that absence still remained. Ring-fenced, sequestered, set aside. For only love to fill.

All of our lives contain days which do not turn out as we expected. Left field days. Days that are surprisingly wonderful, or suddenly life-wrenchingly awful with no warning. No way to see it coming.

Somehow, mortality always come knocking when we're least prepared, most vulnerable. There was a call from home, to tell the man who had two hearts that Maeve was dying.

And so he simply left. He quit his job and quit the city, moved back to that very town where he'd grown up, and to that very house, that very home.

Maeve still looked well, for now, but she had no illusions, knew that the shadow on those scans would be the end of things. She told him not to worry, that she'd led as good a life as she could manage, wasn't bitter at the things she couldn't change.

He stayed to keep her company, to make her breakfast and to make her laugh, and as the months of her decline slid by, he stayed to care for her, as she'd long cared for him.

She let him stay, was grateful for him. She was proud of him, of who he had decided to become, for she remembered still the broken boy who'd almost died on that bad day so many years ago.

It was a tough eight months, for both of them, but Hennessey was grateful for the chance to spend this time with her. They talked a lot about the lives that they had led, together and apart. They talked about his mother and their memories of her, and how happy she had made them. They talked about his future, what he might do next. What made him happy, made him feel fulfilled. He didn't want to go back to the city, or at least not straight away. He was fairly sure he wouldn't stay here either, not once Maeve was gone. They decided he should travel, and on good days when her pain was not too great they'd plan adventures for him, grand itineraries. 

"I always wanted to see this place," Maeve would say, "so now you must do that for me." 

Or sometimes, "That place there is marvellous! I went there many times when I was young. I think you'd love it."

And when it was all over, and he was again alone, he buried then his second mother in the cold hard earth beside the first.

Time to go, then. Time to travel, see the world, fulfil his bargain with her, since this was the price that she'd demanded from him. That had been their deal, unspoken, that she'd let him stay and face the end with her, but only on condition that he then lived on, was happy.

He did his best, to do as she had bid. He did not crumble, did not fall apart. He grieved, of course, but did not let his grief consume him, held it back. But what he did not do was leave.

He stayed for months, still living in the house that Maeve had left him. Each day he would make a little progress, in gath'ring up her clothes or her belongings, the cluttered remnants of a life well lived, now left for him to find good homes for.

He knew that he was trying to delay, was putting off beginning on his travels. He knew that she'd be disappointed in him. Yet he stayed.

And then one day there came a knocking on his door. Had he been travelling, as he had promised, he would not have heard it. It was a gentle knock, in contrast to the rude insistence that is normal in such sounds. This one was almost hesitant.

Hennessey wasn't travelling, though. He'd stayed there, waiting for he knew not what. Some sign or portent that might let him know that it was time. Time to let go, move on, be gone.

He was sitting in the kitchen. There was a coffee cup in front of him upon the table, fresh made and too hot yet to sip, and he was sitting there in silence, listening to the sound of birdsong from the garden. Peaceful. Calm. 

So, gentle though it was, he heard the tapping at his door, and rose, and answered it, and there stood Jennifer.

She was passing by and, so, as always on the rare occasions when she came through town, she'd stopped to chat with Maeve.

He led her in, and sat her down, poured her a drink, stayed with her while she cried and mourned and tried to come to terms. Berated herself for not having heard, not having known, for missing funerals and missing wakes, missing the chance to feel this grief in its allotted hour, with others all around who felt it too, all freshly going through the same.

Looking back, years later, they'd decide that they were lucky, to have this meeting, for the first time in so many years, be dominated not by what it might have been. Their grief for Maeve was shared and understood, and something neither blamed the other for, and then before they knew it hours had passed, and they were catching up. He told her all his news, the life he'd led, the city and his job and how he'd chucked it in the year before and now felt aimless and alone, all spun about. He told her stories from the months he'd spent with Maeve before she'd died, how much the old, bad, woman had delighted in his shock at all her tales of scand'lous exploits from her youth. Of how much she had laughed, and of how she'd been at peace with things, not bitter, at this ending.

He heard about Jen's travels and travails, that she'd been married, had a child, was raising him alone. They talked all afternoon, and then all evening. And then she left and drove away and it was three whole days before he followed her. And it was three whole weeks before she let him meet her son. And it was three whole months before they woke up in the morning by each other's side, and even after all those days and weeks and months not either one of them had yet dared say "Let's try again."

Yet try again they did, of course.

And I shall not say that they then fell in love, for that would mean they'd ever truly stopped, and I'm not clear they had. They did not fall, so much as rise.

His darker heart now sang, but it was not the same song that he'd heard before. It was a deeper, richer thing. Matured. No longer childish. It was braided through with loss and pain and hope and life and dreams and with the daring still to dream them and, too, it had one other thing that it had lacked before. It had harmonies. For the song was not now sung by just one heart alone.

They loved her differently, his hearts, for they were not the same, but those two different loves were equal in intensity.

So Hennessey loved Jennifer with his whole self, finally, and the man who had two hearts looked back on all their years apart and all his searching and he knew that it was time for something new.

And there you have it, and my story's done, for this much was as much as I was told. 

I suspect that as an ending it needs work in fact, since it is in truth quite plainly a beginning. But I leave the rest to you. Feel free to pass it on, if you should find yourself around the table in a bar, long after closing.

There are three rules, of course, as is traditional in such bargains. 

Rule One - You must never tell it quite the same, for as we know a story trapped in just one form will sicken. 

Rule Two - Whatever changes and embellishments you make must all be true. Your heart will know the difference, so if ever you're uncertain if some change that you're about to make is true just pause, and listen to your heart, and you'll be fine.

Rule Three - There will be a happy ending. 

This last is not a rule you have to follow. It will not constrain you. It is just a truth. 

If you tell it right, it will have a happy ending.