Your Heart Belongs to Me

condition of his heart. With every visit, he became more convinced that he had made the right decision when he turned to this dedicated man.
    A few unfortunate side effects of the medications gave Ryan moments of discomfort, but he suffered none of the painful seizures, spells of arrhythmia, or breathing problems that previously plagued him. This argued for the superiority of Dr. Hobb’s care, but it also suggested that Ryan had been prudent when he took control of his treatment in such a way as to foil anyone who secretly might have wished him ill.
    At five o’clock in the morning, on January 14, the call came. A heart match had been found.
    Of all the lists on which Ryan had appeared— Forbes magazine’s top one hundred Internet entrepreneurs, Wired magazine’s top twenty most creative lords of the Web, People magazine’s one hundred most eligible bachelors—he had risen to the top of the only list that mattered.
    After all the months of waiting, now came the call for action, and time was of the essence to a degree that Ryan had never known before.
    Having been declared brain-dead, the donor’s body would remain on life support until Ryan arrived at that hospital and was prepared for surgery. If the heart did not have to be stored for several hours in a forty-degree saline solution, if no risks had to be taken with its transport, if it could be removed from the donor by the same surgical team that without delay transplanted it into the recipient, the chances of success would be significantly increased.
    Things could still go wrong. Depending on the injuries or the illness that had led to his brain death, the donor might still suffer a heart attack, severely damaging cardiac muscle and rendering his heart useless for transplant. An undetected infection of the kidneys or the liver or another internal organ, secondary to the donor’s cause of death and not immediately recognized, might lead to toxemia, or in an extreme case to septic shock and widespread tissue damage. The life-support equipment could malfunction. The hospital’s power supply could fail.
    Ryan preferred not to dwell on what might go wrong. Considering his condition, the worst thing he could do was psych himself into high anxiety. He had lived hardly a third of the year that Dr. Gupta had predicted, but a full year had not been a guarantee, only an estimate. His heart might deal him a deathblow at any time, whereupon he would no longer be an organ recipient but a donor, his corneas and his lungs and his liver and his kidneys carved out of him for the benefit of others.
    Immediately after receiving the 5:00 A.M . notification, Ryan called Samantha, desperate that she not answer the phone. He did not want to talk to her directly, to have to answer her questions, to hear the sense of disappointment in her voice or the fear for him that she would surely express.
    As she labored on the final chapters of her novel, Sam often worked late into the evening and went to bed after midnight. At this hour, Ryan hoped she would have switched off the phone and that he would get her voice mail—which he did.
    Even her flat sorry-I’m-not-available-to-take-your-call speech pierced him, mundane and poignant at the same time. He wondered if he would hear her voice again, or see her.
    “Sam, I love you, I love you more than I can say. Listen, the call just came. A heart match. I’m flying out. I arranged with Dr. Hobb and his team to do the surgery. I didn’t tell you because you would think I’m paranoid, but I don’t think I am, Sam, I think what I did was what I had to do. Maybe I didn’t handle the diagnosis well, maybe it made me a little crazy, and maybe paranoia is a side effect of these medications, but I don’t think so. Anyway, I’ll sort all that out when I’m well, when I get back, if I make it. Sam, Sam, my God, Sam, I want you with me, I wish you could be, but not if I die, and I might, it is a possibility. So it’s best you stay here. What I want for you, no matter what, is that you finish the novel, that it’s a huge success for you, and that you are always as happy as you so very much deserve to be. Maybe you could dedicate the book to me. No, scratch that. It’s not right for me to ask. Dedicate it to anybody you want, to some idiot who doesn’t deserve it, if that’s what you want. But if the book is at all about love, Sam, and knowing you I think it has to be, if it’s at all about love, maybe you can tell them you learned at