I married a seventy-year-old hospice patient so she could know what it felt like to be a bride. After the funeral her solicitor took me aside and said: she didn’t choose you by accident.

Dates. A list of my shifts going back to the previous March. In a different pen from everything else, which means it was added to over time.

There is a note beside the fourth Thursday in the July. It says: good with the Persaud woman.

Mrs Persaud was in the bay opposite. I sat with her twice while her daughter went for a cigarette.

I did not think anybody had noticed and I certainly did not think a woman four beds down with months left was keeping a note of it.

And a photocopy of a death notice from 2014, with my mother’s name on it, from a local paper that folded in 2019.

There is a pencil mark next to it. A tick.

That is all. One tick, in pencil, in the margin, next to my mother’s name in a newspaper.

I sat in a car park for about forty minutes with that page and I could not work out what I was feeling, and I have since decided it was being on a list.

Somebody had gone through a very great many of those notices for fourteen years, and my mother had received a tick, and eleven years later so had I.

She picked me off the hospice volunteer list eleven weeks before we ever met.

I have the date she requested the list. It is in that file, because Ferris put it there, because he wanted me to be able to check every single thing he was about to tell me.

Eleven weeks. She waited eleven weeks for a Thursday where I would be on the rota for her wing.

She could have asked for me. That is the thing.

A patient in that building can request a particular volunteer and it is written on a form and it takes about four days.

She did not, because a request goes on a file, and a file gets read by a manager, and a manager would have asked why.

So a woman with months left chose to spend eleven weeks of them waiting for a rota to do it on its own.

That is either extraordinary patience or it is a person who has spent forty years making sure nothing about her can ever be traced back, and it is obviously the second one, and the second one is not admirable — it is a habit.

She could not stop doing it even when the thing she was hiding was a kindness.