I was hired to sit with a man the doctors said had five days left. One night I laid my teething baby on his chest — and his fingers moved. Then he whispered: don’t tell anyone I’m awake.

I had thought something about it on the second visit.

I thought: that’s odd.

And then I carried on making up a bottle, because a nine-month-old does not wait while you think about somebody else’s briefcase.

PART 4

I am not a nurse. I have a level three qualification and eleven months of experience and I did not work any of this out from medicine.

I worked it out from the chart.

I am the one who fills it in. Every shift, for six weeks, in my handwriting, because the agency requires it and because I am the person in that room.

And that vial has never once appeared on it.

It is not on the prescription list taped inside the cabinet door.

It is not on the handover sheet. It is not on the agency’s medication record, which I sign at the end of every week.

Three times a week, for six weeks. Nineteen visits.

Not one of them recorded anywhere.

Something was going into that man and then leaving the house in a leather case.

I did not need to understand medicine.

I needed to be able to count, and to know what a blank line in my own handwriting means.