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 the only reason I did not is that my son got a tooth.

That is not a moral. That is luck, and it is somebody else’s four hours of counting pipes, and it is a bedroom at the wrong end of a corridor.

I would like there to be more in it than that.

There is not. There is a tooth, and a corridor, and a woman who was four weeks too slow.