The operating room, white porcelain tile and stainless steel, was drenched in light.

From the scrub room, Dr. Hobb arrived with his team, lacking only Wally Dunnaman, who had no role in the cutting. Besides Dougal Hobb, there were an anesthesiologist, three cardiology nurses, an assistant surgeon, and two others whose specialties and functions Ryan could not recall.

He had met them on the Medijet, and he had liked them all, so far as it was possible to like anyone who was going to saw you open and handle your internal organs as blithely as though they were the giblets in a Thanksgiving turkey. There was bound to be some social distance between the cutters and he who must be cut.

Except for Hobb, Ryan was not easily able to tell who was who in their hair-restraining caps, behind their masks, in their green scrubs. They might have all been ringers, the B team inserted after the A team had been approved and paid for.

As the anesthesiologist found a vein in Ryan’s right arm and inserted a cannula, Dr. Hobb told him that the donor’s heart had been successfully removed moments ago and waited now in a chilled saline solution.

Ryan had learned on the Medijet that he was to receive a woman’s heart, which only briefly surprised him. She had been twenty-six, a schoolteacher who had suffered massive head trauma in an automobile accident.

Her heart had been deemed of suitable size for Ryan. And every criterion of an immune-system match had been met, greatly increasing the chances that all would go well not merely during surgery but also afterward, when his body would be less likely to aggressively reject the new organ.

Nevertheless, to prevent rejection and other complications, he would be taking a battery of twenty-eight drugs for a significant length of time following surgery, some for the rest of his life.

As they readied Ryan, Dr. Hobb explained to him the purpose of each procedure, but Ryan did not need to be gentled toward the moment. He could not turn back now. The wanted heart was free, the donor dead, and a single path to the future lay before him.

He closed his eyes, tuned out the murmured conversations of the members of the team, and pictured Samantha Reach. Throughout his adolescence and adult life, he had sought perfection, and had found it only once-in her.

He hoped that she could be perfectly forgiving, too, although he knew he should start conceiving now his opening line for his first phone call to her, when he was strong and clearheaded enough to speak.

Closing his eyes, he saw her on the beach, blond hair and golden form, a quiver of light, an alluring oasis on the wide slope of sun-seared sand.

As the induced sleep came over him, he drifted down as if into a sea, and the darkness darkled into something darker than mere dark.

Now comes the evening of the mind.

Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood. -Donald Justice, “The Evening of the Mind”

On the one-year anniversary of his heart transplant, Ryan Perry made no plans for a celebration. Being alive was celebration enough.

During the morning, he worked alone in the garage, performing routine maintenance on a fully sparkled ’32 five-window deuce coupe that he had bought at auction.

In the afternoon, ensconced in an armchair with a footstool, in the smaller of the two living rooms, he continued reading Samantha’s first book.

Styled as a solarium, the chamber provided an atmosphere to match that in the novel. Tall windows revealed a down sky, a limp pillow stuffed with the soft wet feathers of gray geese. Needles of rain knitted together scattered scarves of thin fog, which then unraveled through whatever tree or shrub next snagged them.

The room’s collection of palms and ferns webbed the limestone floor with spidery shadows. The air had a green and fertile scent, for the most part pleasing, although from time to time there arose a faint fetid odor of what might have been decomposing moss or root rot, which seemed always, curiously, to be detectable only when he read passages that in particular disturbed him.

She had 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.