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.

I said: it won’t happen again.

He left. I waited until the footsteps had gone all the way down the stairs.

Then Rendel opened his eyes and said: don’t tell him anything.

I nodded.

And then he did something with his face that took me a while to read and that I got wrong at the time.

I thought he was frightened.

He was not. He has told me since, and I believe him, that in that moment he was working out whether I would last the week — because he had already watched two carers come and go since the September, and because a man in that bed has nothing to do all day except assess the only people who come into the room.

He had been assessing me for six weeks before I ever knew he was there.

He knows what I sing to my son. He knows I cry in that room on a Thursday, which is when the agency money lands and does not cover things.

That is the part nobody thinks about when they hear the word paralysed.

And it works the other way too, which is the part I have to sit with.

He heard everything I said in that room for six weeks.