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.

Then I went back to work and made breakfast for two people and behaved completely normally for eleven days.

That is the whole heroic act. A woman in a bathroom with a phone and no flash on.

Christo has not been in that house since the March of that year. He wrote to me once, four lines, and the only interesting thing about it is that he spelled my name wrong.

I do not work there any more. Rendel offered and I said no, and it took him about five months to understand why, and he does now.

I work in an office. It is dull and it is thirty-one thousand a year and there is a woman called Prue who brings in a cake nobody likes.

I have a flat with two bedrooms in it and Theodric has the one with the window over the road, and he is two and a half and he is loud.

He has a bed with a rail on it and there is nobody who can ask us to leave.

Rendel comes on a Sunday, most Sundays. He brings the wrong sort of biscuit every single time and I have stopped correcting him.