He heard them.

He had heard all of it, every casual word about caskets and services, every impatient calculation, and he had lain there absorbing it with a mind as clear as my own, unable to answer.

I have never in my life felt anything quite like the cold that went through me then, the understanding of what these people had been doing, in effect, to a fully conscious man.

And underneath the cold, rising fast, came something else, something I did not expect.