‘Full or empty,’ Gram said, ‘as long as it’s special!’

He and Ning left for his villa.

Mon complained of a headache and said she wasn’t feeling well. Haut gave her two Panadol and they went to bed.

At 6 a.m. Mon began to get out of bed, but couldn’t move her left side. She fell back and groaned. Haut tried to help her up. He massaged her left arm and leg. Mon remained in pain and was dizzy. She moaned and was in and out of consciousness.

‘You seem to have some kind of paralysis,’ Haut said, trying to remain calm. He was soon in his hire car, taking her to hospital.

*

An hour after Mon was admitted, two doctors, one Thai and one English, took Haut aside.

‘She’s had a stroke,’ the English doctor told him.

‘What? She’s just twenty-two!’

‘That’s her best advantage. She has a strong body and heart. If she rests, she should make a full recovery.’

‘Should?’ Haut echoed.

‘We can’t say at this moment. We’ll assess her further in a few hours and decide on medication.’

Haut left in a quandary and went over in his mind everything that had happened to Mon in the past few weeks. He had taken her to Bangkok for dental work, but the doctors who examined her said this was unlikely to be the cause of the stroke. He knew Mon had been under stress over an illness her mother had endured in the last few days.

Two weeks later, Mon was back in Haut’s villa. She was still weak, but insistent that she return to Mandalay in Burma to see her mother, whose illness had worsened. The doctors told him it was a risk for her to travel but agreed that more stress over her mother might make her condition deteriorate. They let Haut make the decision.

He had just put her to bed in the villa one night when he received a phone call from New York. It was Christine Donnelly, William’s wife. She was nervous.

‘William died this morning,’ she said, her voice tearful.

‘Oh, God no! What was it?’

‘Doctors say a brain tumour.’

‘I’ll get to New York as soon as possible.’

‘Oh, really, Al, you don’t have to.’

‘He always said that if anything happened to him, he would want me to give the eulogy.’

Haut decided to fly Mon to Mandalay, return to Bangkok and then fly the seventeen hours to New York.

Just before boarding the plane to Mandalay, Mon closed her phone and burst into tears. Her mother was in a coma.

‘I don’t care about the money,’ Mon said, ‘I just want her to be well.’

Haut comforted her as they sat in the plane.

‘I can pray into it,’ he said, ‘if you give me details—her full name, age and what the doctors say about her condition.’