Your Heart Belongs to Me

infused the novel with quiet humor, and one of her central subjects proved to be love, as he had intuited when he’d left the long message on her voice mail, before his transplant surgery. Yet in the weave of the narrative were solemn threads, somber threads, and the entire garment she had sewn seemed darker than the materials from which she had made it.
    The story enthralled Ryan, and though the prose was luminous and swift, he resisted rushing through the pages, but instead savoured the sentences. This was his second reading of the novel in four days.
    Winston Amory wheeled to Ryan’s chair a serving cart on which stood a sterling-silver coffeepot with candle-burner to keep the contents warm, and a small plate of almond cookies.
    “Sir, I took the liberty of assuming, as you are not at a table, you might prefer a mug to a cup.”
    “Perfect, Winston. Thank you.”
    After pouring a mug of coffee, Winston placed a coaster on the table beside the armchair, and then the mug upon the coaster.
    Referring to his wife, Winston said, “Penelope wonders if you would like dinner at seven, as usual.”
    “A little later tonight. Eight would be ideal.”
    “Eight it is, sir.” He nodded once, his customary abbreviated bow, before departing stiff-backed and straight-shouldered.
    Although Winston managed the estate and marshaled the household staff to its duties with consummate grace and professionalism, Ryan suspected that he and Penelope exaggerated their Englishness, from their accents to their mannerisms, to their obsession with propriety and protocol, because they had learned, in previous positions, that this was what enchanted Americans who employed their services. This performance occasionally annoyed him, more often amused him, and in sum was worth enduring because they did a fine job and because he had complete trust in them.
    Before returning home for further recuperation after receiving his new heart, he had dismissed Lee and Kay Ting, as well as their assistants. Each had been given two years of severance pay, about which none complained, plus a strong letter of recommendation, but no explanation.
    He had no evidence of treachery in their case, but he had no proof that would exonerate them, either. He had wanted to come home to a sense of security and peace.
    Wilson Mott’s report on Winston and Penelope Amory—and on the other new employees—was so exhaustive that Ryan felt as if he knew them all as well as he knew himself. He was not suspicious of them, and they gave him no reason to wonder about their loyalty; and the year had gone by without a single strange incident.
    Now, with coffee and cookies at hand, Ryan again became so absorbed in Sam’s novel that he lost track of the passage of time, and looked up from a chapter’s end to find that the early-winter twilight had begun to drain from the day what light the rain and fog had not already drowned.
    Had he raised his eyes only a few minutes later, he might not have been able to see the figure on the south lawn.
    Initially he thought this visitor must be a shadow shaped by plumes of fog, because it appeared to be a monk in hooded habit far from any monastery.
    A moment’s consideration remade the habit into a black raincoat. The hood, the fading light, and a distance of forty feet hid all but the palest impression of a face.
    The visitor— intruder began to seem a better word—appeared to be staring at that floor-to-ceiling window providing the most direct view of Ryan in his armchair.
    As he put aside his book and rose to approach the window, the figure moved. By the time he reached the glass, he saw no sign of an intruder.
    Through the drizzling rain, nothing moved on the broad south lawn except slowly writhing anacondas of fog.
    After a year that had flowed by in the most ordinary currents, Ryan was prepared to dismiss the brief vision as a trick of twilight.
    But the figure reappeared from among three deodar cedars that, with their drooping boughs, seemed themselves like giant monks in attendance at a solemn ceremony. Slowly the figure moved into view and then stopped, once again facing the solarium.
    Dimming by the minute, the dying day exposed less of the face than before, although the intruder had ventured ten feet closer to the house.
    Just as Ryan realized that it might not be wise to stand exposed at a lighted window, the figure turned and retreated across the lawn. It seemed not to step away but to glide, as if it too were merely fog,