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.

The baby went to sleep almost at once, the way they do when there is a heartbeat under them.

I had put him down on a man I had been told was dying, and I had done it without hesitating, and I want to be accurate about why that did not feel like anything at the time.

By week six you stop seeing a patient as a person on a timeline. You see a set of tasks with a body attached, and that is not callousness, it is the only way anybody does that job for eleven months.

I had turned that man, washed him, and talked over him about a bus timetable.

Putting a baby on him for four seconds was not, to me, a decision at all.

And then it happened.

Rendel’s fingers moved, slowly, in stages, until they touched the blanket.

I whispered: Mr Ashgrove?

His eyelids went. One eye opened slightly.

He was conscious.