Your Heart Belongs to Me

flourishes to confirm the excellence of the service without descending to showiness.
    As they began to eat, Ryan changed the subject. “You’re so lovely tonight. Everyone is taken with you, the center of attention.”
    “Well, we are at the center of the room, you’ll notice. And I suspect most of these people know who you are, which makes me very much the supporting act.”
    She let him lead her down conversational byways, but in time she returned to Hobb. “Before you leave Dr. Gupta, talk to Forry.”
    “I will. But they don’t get better than Dougal Hobb. I even had a complete background done on him.”
    “Background?”
    “By an extremely dependable security firm. To see if he’s had any malpractice suits filed against him, personal problems of any kind.”
    Her blue-green eyes did not darken, but her mood underwent a tidal change. “You had a private detective scope him out?”
    “It’s my life on the line, Sam. I want to be sure I’m in the best possible hands.”
    “Forry is your friend. He sent you to the best. He wants the best for you.”
    “Dr. Hobb has never had a complaint lodged against him, let alone a legal action.”
    “Has Dr. Gupta?” she asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “I’m sure he hasn’t.”
    “I don’t know. But listen, Dr. Hobb’s private life is without a stain, his finances are in perfect order, his marriage is rock-solid, his—”
    Putting down her knife and fork, she said, “You’re scaring me.”
    He raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
    “Can’t you hear yourself? You’re trying to handle this, take charge, but it’s fundamentally not yours to take charge of.”
    He answered her concern with a sheepish look. “Be to do. It’s not just the cute name of a company. It’s a life philosophy. Taking control is a hard habit to break.”
    “And trusting people is a difficult habit to establish, Ryan, not least of all for people like you and me, considering where we come from.”
    “You’re right. All right. I know.”
    “We can shape our fates,” she said, “but we can’t control them. You can’t control death. You need a team here. You need to make these decisions only after consultation.”
    “I’m consulting with you right now.”
    She neither broke eye contact nor replied.
    “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. I won’t do anything until I’ve talked to Forry and Dr. Gupta. And to you.”
    She drank some of the Cabernet. She put down the wineglass. She surveyed the glittering room, requiring other diners to look away from her.
    Her attention on Ryan once more, she said, “Sweetie, trust the people who care for you. Trust me especially because I understand you so well, so very well, so entirely—and I love you.”
    Moved, he said, “I love you, too.”
    “If you knew me as completely as I know you,” she said, “you might not love me.”
    “Impossible. What a thing to say.”
    “No, it’s true. Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work—it’s a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him. Or her. I don’t need dessert. Do you?”
    She had so riveted him that her change of subject did not at first compute, and he stared at her as though she had switched from English to some obscure Russian dialect.
    Then: “Oh. No. I don’t need dessert.”
    “Maybe after the wine, a double espresso.”
    “That sounds good.”
    She said no more about Dr. Hobb or about the knotted, desperate nature of humanity, but spoke of happier things.
    Over the espresso, she favored Ryan with an affectionate smile that gladdened him, and as chandelier light danced in her eyes, she said, “See, Winky, you could have taken me to the farthest corner of the room, and even in that privacy, I wouldn’t have scalped you or even boxed your ears.”
     

     
    Little more than one day later, on December 14, at home alone, as he awaited the sleep that for hours had eluded him, comforted by the glow of a bedside lamp that he was loath to turn off these days, Ryan suffered a sudden breathing problem.
    He inhaled without relief, as if the air he took in were going elsewhere than to his lungs, although his belief that he was drawing full breaths might have been a misperception. An immediate sense of suffocation overcame him, a choking anxiety, and he could not stave off panic.
    When he pushed up from the mattress, he was whirled into such a dizziness that the bed seemed to be on a carousel, and he fell back onto his pillows, gasping,