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.

And that man has known his, every single week, for eleven years.

That is the actual engine of this. Not greed. A man who was right once, eleven years ago, about somebody whose name he never learned.

I have gone round and round whether that makes it better or worse and I have stopped trying to decide.

What I will say is this. There is a version of Halloran who spent eleven years being furious at a system and at a letter and at a decision.

And then one day a name he already hated turned up on a list of private patients within driving distance.

Nobody plans a thing like that from the start. You get offered it, by chance, at fifty-seven, when you have spent a decade being smaller than you expected to be.

And then you have to decide, in an afternoon, whether you are the sort of person who takes it.

He is. That is the whole of the answer and it took him about a week.

Now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.

I knew something was wrong in week two.

I noticed the case. I noticed it on the second visit, because it goes out heavier than a case with nothing in it.