‘I think you do enough for your clients,’ he’d said. ‘You’re paid an hour for just that; an hour.’

He’d made it sound so easy, but I defy anyone with half a heart to listen to what my clients say, and not think about it for long after they’ve left. It’s a bit like reading a book. You know that feeling you get when you’re so fully invested in the characters that you have to read one more page? And then another and another, until you find out what happens to them, even when you know you can’t do anything to change their fate and what the author has already written on the pages.

But what if you could change the end of the story? What if you had the chance to change somebody’s life, at no cost to your own? You would, wouldn’t you?

2

‘Hello?’ comes a timid voice, as if nervous to announce his arrival.

I turn from watering the orchids on my bookshelf to see Jacob’s bearded face peering around the Crittall door.

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Come on in.’

He hesitates and my eyes follow his to the handkerchief he’s cradling in his hands.

‘What’s that?’ I ask.

‘I found it just outside,’ he says as I go towards him. ‘I don’t think he’s going to make it.’

I peer into the cotton nest Jacob’s created to see a stricken bird, lying there perfectly still.

‘Oh, poor thing, where was he?’

‘Right outside your door,’ he says, tilting his head towards the stone paving by the threshold.

‘I didn’t see it when I came in,’ I say.

‘You couldn’t miss it,’ he says. ‘It was right there.’

I shiver in an unconscious attempt to shrug off the menacing cloak that’s wrapping itself around me. I’ve always found dead birds to be rather sinister; I think it stems from a horror movie I saw when I was a kid and ever since, I’ve questioned their mortality. How can there be so many birds in the world and yet we see so few dead? Where do they go to die?

On my doorstep, it seems.

‘It’s still warm,’ he says, stepping back outside.

I wonder how I could have missed it, unless it had just happened. But how? Birds don’t just drop out of the sky.

I remember the door being ajar and feel a growing sense of unease as I watch Jacob dig in the soil with his bare hands before tenderly placing the bird, still wrapped in his handkerchief, into the hole. He comes back in with sad eyes, and dirt caked under his fingernails.