His heart was failing, slowly and certainly, and no amount of money in the world was going to buy it back.

One evening, as I was carrying a tray back from Florence’s room, he stopped me in the hallway.

He was a formal man, not given to small talk or to sharing his troubles, and so what he said next surprised me.

“Soon,” he told me quietly, looking not at me but out the window at the dark grounds, “I will need a caregiver of my own.

My heart is failing.” There was no self-pity in it, only a plain statement of fact, the way another man might mention that it looked like rain.