Your Heart Belongs to Me

she should contact them and ascertain if either had been the culprit.
    The intensity of her gray-eyed stare and a certain set to her mouth suggested that she regarded this incident as a challenge to her authority and as a personal affront for which she would be pleased to pursue the miscreant to the gates of Hell, if necessary, and give him an upbraiding that he would find worse than the tortures that awaited him in the flames of damnation.
    “It’s commendable of you,” Ryan said placatingly, “to be so committed to finding an explanation. But it’s not all that important, Penelope. Let’s not take this out of house. Someone must have meant it as a joke, that’s all.”
    “You can rest assured, I’ll keep my eye on those gentlemen when next they’re on the premises,” she said.
    “I have no doubt of it,” he said. “No doubt at all.”
    Alone in the solarium, he returned to his favorite armchair and opened Samantha’s book to begin a third reading.
     

     
    Rain began to fall at a quarter past two. As on the previous day, Nature was in an indolent mood, and the sky shed a languid drizzle.
    From time to time, Ryan interrupted his reading to sweep the south lawn with his gaze.
    He glanced up from the novel less often than he intended. Had the hooded figure returned, it could have watched him for half an hour or longer without his being aware of its presence.
    The story, the characters, the prose still enchanted him, but from this third reading, he sought something more than any other work of fiction could have given him. Being in the story was being with Samantha, hearing her voice, which to him counted as both a joy and a sadness.
    He also hoped to gain an understanding of why things were the way they were between them. Having completed the book the very day she learned of his transplant, Sam could not have written any part of it with the intention of explaining their estrangement to him, and anyway people didn’t write entire novels to each other in the place of a letter or a phone chat. Yet on his first reading, in only three chapters, he had sensed that this book had something to reveal to him that would explain their current relationship.
    Throughout, the novel sang with Samantha’s voice, glowed with her grace, and reflected her sensibilities, but it also contained many scenes that Ryan would not have thought she could write, that sounded like Samantha…but like Samantha as she might have been if some of the experiences that shaped her life had never happened.
    This made him feel that he had never fully known her. If he was to make things right between them, rounding out his understanding of Sam was a necessary first step, and the view into her heart provided by this novel seemed certain to help him.
    Prior to twilight, Ryan put down the book to survey the lawn, the trees, and the south wall of the estate, on which bougainvillea flourished, providing a thorny obstacle to a quick exit by any intruder. No watcher in the wet.
    He got up from the armchair, leaving the floor lamp lit to imply that he had stepped away for only a moment.
    At a window near a corner of the room, from between a pair of queen palms lush enough to shade him from the high ceiling lights, he studied the sodden landscape.
    Whoever the woman might be, Ryan doubted she would return so soon to prowl the grounds, for she knew that she had been seen on her first visit. Yet stranger things had happened.
    Beyond the rain, behind the clouds, the gentle hand of twilight dimmed the sky, and night soon threw the switch to black. The hooded figure did not appear.
     

     
    After dinner, when Ryan retired to the third floor, he locked the door with the blind deadbolt. With some trepidation, he went directly from the suite foyer into the bedroom.
    The bedspread had been removed, and the covers had been turned down, as they should have been. But nothing had been left on his stack of pillows.
    As peculiar as the gift of candy hearts seemed, nevertheless Ryan felt foolish for expecting that it might represent the beginning of a new series of mysterious incidents that would send him spiraling into a whirlpool of irrationality like the one in which he had found himself more than a year ago. All of that bizarreness had proved to be coincidence that had seemed substantive only because of the effect on his thinking of poorly oxygenated blood and subsequently because of the side effects of medications.
    He checked the two doors to the decks. Each