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.

Every time I was short with him because my back hurt. Every time I said right then in that bright voice you use when you are turning somebody and do not want to think about what you are doing.

Once, in the October, I said out loud, to nobody, while changing a sheet: I cannot do this much longer.

I have never asked him whether he remembers that one, and he has never brought it up, and I am fairly sure both of those facts are deliberate.

And I want to record that in that moment I had already decided to do nothing, because I had a child asleep two rooms away and a contract that ends at the end of a sentence like the one Christo had just said to me.

What changed my mind was not courage. It was four o’clock.

PART 3

At four the doctor arrived with a leather case.

Osric Halloran. Fifty-seven. He has been coming three times a week since the September and he has never once said my name.

There were about twenty people in that house by then. Family in from two cities, two agency staff, a woman from the office with a folder, a man who I still do not know who he was.