It was not a decision so much as a drift; I would finish with the patients I was assigned to, and then, before I left, I would find myself at Julian’s door, poking my head in to ask if he needed anything.

At first he barely spoke.

He was polite, careful, a little guarded, the way a man is guarded who has spent a long time expecting nothing from anyone.

But he always looked up when I came in, and after a while I understood that he was looking up a little more eagerly each time, that the guarded politeness was thawing into something warmer, and that this solitary old man had begun, without either of us naming it, to look forward to the moments when I appeared in his doorway.

I did not think much, at the time, about why a man with no visitors had ended up at that particular hospice, of all the facilities in the city.