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.

And I had. Six weeks out of that corridor, and I had.

I have got better. I have not got good.

There is a process.

It is slow and it is not finished and I am not going to write about it, except for one thing that I think matters and that nobody warned us about.

It is her process. Not mine.

Every instinct I have — twenty-two years of them — is to take it over, resource it properly, assign it somebody competent and report back to her weekly.

And the one thing it cannot survive is me doing that.

So I sit in rooms and I say nothing and I let a thirty-one-year-old woman answer questions slowly and badly and in her own order, and it is the hardest professional discipline I have ever had to learn, and it is not professional at all.

The file went where it needed to go, in full, with Isaura’s name on it, which she asked for and which surprised me and which I have thought about a great deal since.

I did not take any of it public.

I had about four opportunities and one very persuasive phone call from a journalist who had got the 2019 name from somewhere, and I did not.