She didn’t want her patient escaping. She didn’t think she would bother to propose the agreement.

No point.

Chapter Twenty-one

‘He is not yours, I’m telling you. Why don’t you fucking believe me? How many times? I am sorry, of course I am, how does apologising change anything? But don’t you understand in your fucked-up brain?’

He always felt that recurring accusation was a cruel blow too.

‘I wanted a child, I wanted us to have a child. Together, but, well you know, fuck it, stop looking at me like that.’

‘But how are you so convinced he is not my child?’

This is what he never wanted to hear, and it was at this point, at this question, that he usually woke in a sweat. And, on cue, Ever awoke, and was indeed covered in a thin coat of sweat; heaviest over his chest, where he could feel the sheet was also wet.

He sat up not knowing for a while where he was, in that moment of disconnect that sleep gives you when it stops, before the realisation of life kicks in. Something Ever rarely wanted to kick in, his life, although the dream that woke him was as bad as life. It was life.

He sat up in bed and looked around for the clock, which was on the other side of the bed, standing digitally red on its own bedside table. He didn’t really need to look at the time, it would be five minutes past four: it always was, and 4.05 turned to 4.06 while he was confirming what he already knew. A waste of a head-turn, except it also revealed the television remote that he hoped would control the flat screen on the wall opposite the bed. And turn its darkness into light.

In a very short time he had figured out how to turn it on; everybody’s television seemed to have a different process, but this was simple, as the power button illuminated itself when the remote was moved from its resting place, he pressed it and that seemed to produce an almost immediate picture, but no sound, which he didn’t want anyway; it revealed itself to be a shopping channel.

Had the previous occupant really watched a shopping channel?