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.

Eleven times I said ah, that’s lovely, I miss you too, and walked past it, and got on with what I was doing, which on at least three of those occasions was nothing at all.

There is no version of this where I did not know. There is only a version where knowing would have cost me a weekend.

It has been eleven months.

She is not in that house.

She is in mine, and she has been since the March, and she has her own income now and does not need to be there.

She is there anyway, which I have decided to take as the single best thing that has happened to me in my adult life.

It has not been easy and I am not going to write the version where it was. We have had two arguments that neither of us has fully recovered from.

One of them was about me rearranging her medication into a pill organiser without asking, in the April, which took me about four minutes and which she took — correctly — as a woman being managed in her mother’s house by a person very good at logistics.

She said: you’ve done it again.