An exerpt from David Orsini’s
The Weaver of Plots

The letter from Noah Blake arrived when she was not expecting it. The postmark and the    sender’s address told her that the letter had been mailed from Noah’s office within the Blake and Tanner Steel and Aluminum Corporation in the Manhattan section of New York. Here, in Greenwich, Connecticut, seated in the comfortably upholstered home office where she had written many of her novels, she placed the letter on the desk before her. She did not care to open it. Whatever message Noah was sending to her, she would not enjoy reading. He had sent the letter fifteen years too late. 
      Instead of reading the letter, she looked out of the sun-misted panoramic window as a way of deflecting her attention. The two ancient elms stood, as usual, giant-like and apparently invincible, fifty feet in the distance. The night before, an autumn windstorm had torn away most of their russet leaves. Deprived of the vivid colors, the trees retained, nonetheless, a gnarled magnificence. To her imaginative eyes, they were rugged sentries that had, thus far, withstood the battering winds and the pelting rains and all the other adversarial elements of Time. The lessons they offered about survival lay, wordless and emphatic, within their bruised stolidity. From her fleet knowledge of trees, she knew that they could feel. She regarded them as sensate, living beings. Trees did express anger, loneliness, and pain. But their language was known mainly to themselves and to scientists and well-schooled foresters. She envied the apparent stoicism of these two elms outside her window and their disdain of any emotion-laden human language that could express their anguish and their pain.