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.

He had been waking up for weeks.

Whatever it is wears off. And each time it does, he gets about four hours.

Those four hours always land in the middle of the night, because the visits are at four in the afternoon.

And in the middle of the night, there is nobody in that room.

Two months of a conscious man alone in the dark for four hours at a time, with a monitor beeping and a door nobody opened.

I asked him about that, later, when he could say more than a few words at a time.

I asked what he did in those hours.

And he said: counted the pipes.

There is a run of four pipes in the corner of that ceiling where the bathroom was put in, and he counted them, and then he counted the cornice, and then he did his suppliers in alphabetical order, and then he started again.

Fifty-six nights of that, and a forty-six-year-old man says it evenly, and then asks whether I want another cup of tea.

He does not say it dramatically. He says it the way you would describe a long flight.

Until one teething baby kept a woman walking for three hours, and she carried him into the only room in that house that nobody goes into at two in the morning.