"Go on"

It's dinner, some weeks on. Your partner is telling you about the car park. They got back to the car and there was a note on the windscreen, and they thought it was going to be from the woman at number twelve, and you felt the breath go in and your hand start to lift, and you put the pen on the pad and wrote "twelve" and looked at their mouth. And they said, "but it wasn't, it was from a bloke who'd seen someone scrape the wing and left his number as a witness", and you hadn't known there was a scrape, and you hadn't known there was a witness, and the story was a different story from the one you'd have finished for them.

On Tuesday, Priya presents the north region and the numbers dip, and you write "dip" and wait, and she says why, and it isn't the reason you had, and she goes on to what she's done about it, which is the part you'd never heard because you'd always taken the turn at the dip. Afterwards she stays behind and says a thing about the west region that she'd been sitting on for two quarters.

The friend rings at lunch. They're telling you about their mother, and the thing about your mother arrives in your mouth, and you write "mum" and let them get to the end. It's a longer end than you expected and it has a question in it, which you answer. The call is shorter than it used to be, and you did less of it, and they say "thanks, that helped", which they haven't said for a while.

None of this is a transformation. You jumped twice on Wednesday and handed both back. At your parents' table on Sunday you were the quiet one, by that table's standards, and your father asked if you were all right. The pad is on the kitchen table with a column of single words on it, half of them never used. But the tails are coming back. People are finishing their sentences to you, and the sentences are longer than they were, and they've got the point in them, and you're hearing it.

If you take one thing from this book, take this. Tonight, at dinner, when the breath goes in, write one word and look at their mouth until it stops, and then count one. That's the whole method. Everything else is detail.