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 sat on the floor of that little room with the chart photocopies I had taken on my phone and a piece of paper, and I did it properly, the way you do a bank statement when something has gone.

Six weeks. Eighteen shifts a week between two of us. Every medication on that sheet appears between forty and a hundred and twenty times.

Every single one is initialled. Mine are C.A. The other carer’s are a squiggle.

And then there is one thing that has been going into that man since the September that appears zero times.

Not once. Not in a margin, not as a note, not in the incident log, which I have also kept and which has eleven entries in it about a draught in the hallway.

A medicine that exists in the room and does not exist on paper is not a medicine. It is something somebody is carrying.

And here is the part that I have not stopped thinking about since, which is about my son.

He did not wake up because I put a baby on his chest.

There is a version of this that has gone round where a child’s heartbeat brought a man back, and it is a lovely story and it is not what happened and I am not going to let it stand.