My daughter rang me from a hospital bed and said four words. I drove there in my dress uniform — and found her husband’s family already in the corridor with a lawyer and an agreement dated nine days earlier.

Which means it is not simply a template. It is a template that has been improved.

Somebody sat down between 2019 and now and went through that document and made it better, the way you would revise a procedure after an exercise.

She is thirty-eight now and she lives four hundred miles away and she signed hers in a hospital car park at eleven at night with a pen somebody handed her through a car window.

I have not contacted her and I am not going to, and that decision took me about five weeks and two arguments with my sister.

There is one more thing in that document and it is the part that made my solicitor put her pen down.

Clause four is about medical records.

Not about money and not about silence — those are clauses one and two and they are exactly what you would expect.

Clause four asks the signatory to consent to the withdrawal of an existing request for records.

Which means somebody, at some point before that Tuesday, had requested medical records. And somebody in that family knew about it nine days in advance.

My daughter made a request to her own doctor in the January for copies of everything going back to 2022.