She's waiting for him at the back door in her socks with the kitchen light behind her, and before he's got both feet out of the van she's across the yard and has her arms round his neck, kissing him on the cheek, hard, like an auntie.
"You're a lifesaver," Kit says into his collar. She smells of whisky, of all things, and of the cold. She drags him in by the sleeve and does the handover at a gallop in the kitchen: pump, pads, he likes his door open, he hates the radio, the nurse from the hospice comes at eleven for anything that needs a nurse, you don't touch the box, there's soup in the fridge, try and get some in him. Then she takes him through to the parlour with her hand flat on his back, like she's bringing a boy home.
"Frank, this is Owen. Owen, Frank."
The old man is propped up on his pillows in navy pyjamas, with his teeth in. He holds out his hand. It's the same hand. Big, dry, the knuckles gone like walnuts.
"How do you do," says Frank.
"All right," says Owen. "How do."
He shakes it. He lets go. Kit beams at them both like she's set something up at a wedding, and then she gets her coat, and kisses Frank on the forehead, which makes Frank shut his eyes, and goes. The van's in the yard behind her car, so she has to reverse all the way down, badly, the engine whining, and then it's quiet, and there are twelve hours of this.
He stands at the end of the bed.
"You told her," Owen says.
"Sit down, son. You're in my light."
"You told her."
"I did." Frank folds his hands on the blanket. "I wanted to see her face."
He waits for more, and there isn't any, and Frank looks back at him with that pleasant patience, like a man at a level crossing.
"She went to the police, Frank."
"I know. A very nice woman came. Sharma. Her mother's in a home." Frank coughs, a long one, wet, and Owen's hands go to him before his head does, up under the shoulders, forward, the flat of his palm between the shoulder blades. When it's over Frank lies back and says, "Thank you," and means it.
Eighteen days to the hearing. Then Maisie in a room with a door she can shut, in the paint she picked off the chart in B and Q. Unicorn Sneeze. It's a very specific pink. He's got the tin in the van.
He sits down.
"Let me give it back," Owen says.
"Give what back?"
"The money. I'll give it back. What's left. I'll get the rest, I'll do jobs, I'll pay you back the deposit by Christmas. You've not lost anything." He hears himself, fast, reasonable, the voice he used on the drunks in the back of the ambulance, come on, mate, nobody wants a fuss. "She knows now. She's told the police. It's not the same job."
"It's exactly the same job," says Frank. "She just knows about it."
"Frank."
"Malcolm's coming on Monday." Frank says it to the window. "Malcolm Ackroyd. My solicitor. Deaf as a post. He's bringing his clerk and a bit of paper that adds a line to my will. Sixty thousand pounds, to Owen Rudd, for being here." He turns his head on the pillow. "That's you. In the daytime. Being kind to me. Nobody in the world will think twice."
Owen sits very still.
Sixty thousand pounds is a deposit on a house. A garden, a trampoline with a net round it, a solicitor of his own for the next time Leanne's new bloke has opinions. The end of the sums.
"And there's a letter," says Frank. "With Malcolm. Sealed. If she's breathing at my funeral, he opens it."
"What's in it?"
"Your name."
The concentrator hums. Outside, a crow walks along the wall of the yard like it owns it.
"You wouldn't," Owen says.
Frank looks at him, kindly. It's the look Frank gave him at the cemetery in Oldham, in the rain, when Owen was eighteen in his dad's suit with the sleeves too long, and Frank put a big dry hand on the back of his neck and said, I've seen to it, son. All of it. You're not to worry.
"I saw to your father," says Frank. "Forty ton of plasterboard on the bend above the reservoir, in the ice, and I saw to all of it."
He did. Dennis Rudd drove for Ashdown's for twenty-two years, and when they cut him out at Saddleworth in two thousand and six, Frank paid for the funeral, and the stone, and two years later for the paramedic degree, and sent a card when Owen qualified with a fifty-pound note in it. Your dad would have been made up. Uncle Frank, his mum called him, till she died.
"I wouldn't need to," says Frank, "would I?"
Owen looks at his hands. They're clean. He scrubbed them this morning, backs and thumbs and between the fingers, and they still look like somebody else's.
"When, then," he says. "If it's the same job. Give me a when. They said eleven days."
"They did."
"So is it eleven? Is it eight now? Is it—" He can't make his voice stop being reasonable. "I've got a hearing, Frank. The thirtieth. I need to know where I'm going to be."
"You'd like a date," says Frank. "Like a parcel."
"I'd like to know."
"When my heart stops," Frank says, very gently, the way you'd tell a child the time. "You'll know before anyone. You'll probably have your fingers on my wrist."
The nurse from the hospice comes at eleven, a young one, not Bev, and does the pump and checks the line and writes on the sheet and says, "Aren't you lucky, Frank, a man about the house," and Frank says, "Very," and she goes.
Gareth comes at noon.
He comes in through the back like it's his, which it might be, one day, and stops in the parlour doorway with his car keys in his hand, looking at Owen in the chair.
"Who's this?"
"This is Owen," Frank says. "He does my days. The nurse found him."
"The nurse." Gareth says it like you'd say the dog. He looks at Owen properly then, frowning, and Owen looks back, and doesn't look away, because looking away is what guilty people do. "Do I know you?"
"I've got one of those faces," Owen says, and smiles.
Gareth doesn't smile back. He stays twenty minutes. He talks at his father about papers that need signing, and Frank says, "Not today," and Gareth says, "It's always not today," and goes out to the kitchen and rings somebody and shouts at them, and comes back and kisses his father on the top of his head, quick and rough, and leaves without looking at Owen again.
Owen goes out after him as far as the yard gate, for the air, and stands there while the Range Rover takes the lane. At the gate his phone finds a bar and goes in his pocket. The proper one.
Leanne. Saturday nine sharp. She's got her new coat, keep her out of mud. And then, a minute after, a second one: And don't promise her stuff.
He types, Wouldn't dream. He deletes it. He types, See you Saturday, and sends that, and goes back in.
"Your little girl," Frank says, without opening his eyes.
"Yeah."
"Maisie."
He's never told Frank her name. He must have. In October. He must have said it.
At one he heats the soup. Leek and potato, from a carton, Rosie's. He brings it on a tray with a napkin and a spoon, and he does the thing he used to do with the old ladies on the late calls, makes a little game of it, here we go, here comes the good stuff. Frank takes two spoonfuls, slowly, and swallows each one like it's an effort he's making on Owen's behalf.
Then he lays the spoon down on the tray and says, "Owen. You were in the ambulances a long time."
"Eleven years."
"And then you weren't," says Frank. "I came to see you, that spring."
He had. Owen hadn't even known he knew. A December, a bad one, a night shift he turned up for in a state he can't remember turning up in, and a crewmate who did the right thing and rang it in. Struck off by the spring. It's in the court papers now, with the dates. Everything's in the court papers.
"So you'll know." He's looking at the ceiling. "What can a man say no to? At the end. What can they not make him have?"
It's how he asks. Like Owen's the expert. Like Owen's the only one in the world who'd know. Nobody's asked Owen a thing he knew the answer to in three years.
"Anything," Owen says. "Honestly. If you've got capacity, if you're of sound mind, like, you can say no to anything. Food. Drink. They can offer, they can't make you. Antibiotics, if you get a chest infection, you can say no. Hospital. Even the oxygen. You could have that off tomorrow, and nobody could put it back on you, not a doctor, not a nurse. They'd have to stand there." He's warming up; he can hear himself enjoying it, the knowing. "We used to get it all the time. Old fella, ninety, lovely, sat in his chair, wife beside him, he'd say, I'm not going in, son, and that's it, you write it down and you leave him. They can't make you."
"They can't make you," says Frank.
"No."
"Thank you," Frank says, and pushes the soup an inch away with one finger.
Owen looks at the bowl. There's nearly all of it. Skin starting on the top.
"Have a bit more."
"I've had sufficient."
"Frank, come on—"
"Tell me something funny," Frank says. "You've a face for it. Tell me the worst job you ever went to."
So he does. Because he's been asked, and because his mouth is already going before he's decided anything. He tells Frank about Greggs. About the Saturday morning on Market Street, a man about sixty going down in the queue like a dropped coat, and Owen on his knees on the lino doing chest compressions, one and two and three, for eleven minutes, while the queue kept moving round him. He tells how a woman stepped over the man's legs for a steak bake. How the lad on the till said, sorry, do you want a bag for that, and Owen, counting, said, no, I'm fine, before he realised it wasn't him being asked. How the man lived. How he came back to the station a month later with a box of sausage rolls for the whole shift and cried in the car park.
Frank laughs. Not the breathing-out. A real one, that ends in a cough, and Owen's up out of the chair with his hand on Frank's back, and over Frank's shoulder he can see the bowl of soup on the tray, going cold.
"You've good hands," says Frank, when he's done.
The afternoon goes the way afternoons go in a room like this. Frank sleeps with his mouth open and his big hands loose on the blanket, and Owen sits in the chair and counts his breathing. He can't help it. Sixteen a minute. Eighteen. A gap, a long one, and Owen's halfway out of the chair before the next one comes, with a catch at the top, and the old chest goes up and down again. Owen sits back. His shirt's stuck to him. He does it all afternoon, like watching a pan he doesn't want to boil and can't stop checking. The light goes early up here, grey and then nothing, and the window turns into a mirror with him in it.
At half past seven, before Kit's due, Owen takes the tray through to the kitchen. He tips the soup down the sink and runs the tap after it, hot, and washes the bowl, and dries it, and puts it back in the cupboard where it lives, and wipes the tray, and hangs the tea towel on the rail with the edges straight.
Kit comes in at five to eight with a glass bowl in both arms, cling-filmed, bright as a traffic light.
"Trifle," she says. "My mum made it. She says if he won't eat it she'll come up and make him. How's he been?"
"Good as gold," Owen says. "Good as gold, he was."
She puts the trifle down on the kitchen table and hugs him again, one-armed, and goes straight through, coat still on, into the parlour.
"Evening, Frank."
"Evening, Nurse." The old man's voice comes back out into the kitchen, dry and pleased, while Owen does his zip up by the back door. "I like your lad."