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.

Nobody has asked. Not one person, in two years, including the ones whose job it was.

Everybody wanted the baby on the chest. It is a better shape.

Nothing happened in those four weeks that could not have happened in week two.

The same case went out of that house twelve more times while I decided I could not afford to say anything.

If you have noticed something at work that does not add up —

the reason you have not said it is almost never that you are not sure.

You are sure. You have been sure for a while. What you are actually doing is pricing it, in rent, and in whether your children move schools.

I am not going to tell you that price is nothing. It is not nothing. It was the roof over my son.

But say it anyway, on the day you notice it, in writing, to somebody outside the building.

Because the price does not go down while you wait.

The only thing that goes down is the number of days left for the person it is happening to.

I had twelve visits’ worth of that, and I very nearly spent all of them.