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.

That is the whole reason. There was no kindness in it. I want that on the page at the start and not buried at the end, because everything else in this account depends on it.

The doctors said he had days.

He is forty-six. He built everything he has out of haulage companies and he had been in that bed for nearly two months, unable to speak or move a muscle.

Nine lorries in 2004. Four hundred and something people now. There is a framed thing in the downstairs hallway about it.

His nephew had already been discussing the funeral in the tone other people use for booking a restaurant. Flowers. Numbers. Whether the church was too far out.

I work as a live-in carer because I need the wage, and because no other job I have found lets me keep my son with me.

That is not a complaint and it is not a tragedy. It is a fact that arranges my entire life and that decided every single thing I did in that house.