Her office is about nine feet by nine and has a window onto a car park.

And near the end, I asked her whether he had ever said anything to her about the hospital bill.

She thought about it and said no.

And then she said, “Wait.”

And she went into a drawer and got out a spiral notebook — her own, not a file, the kind of notebook a caseworker keeps because the system has nowhere to put half of what happens in a day — and turned back about thirty pages, and found a line.

She had written, in the second week of November, four days after he came out of that hospital: