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.

There is a version of this where a colonel in dress uniform becomes a story, and that version writes itself in about four hours and I have watched it happen to other people.

And in every single one of those versions, the woman in the hospital bed becomes a supporting character in her own mother’s photograph.

Not out of grace. Because my daughter asked me not to, in a kitchen, in the April, and because I have finally worked out that the entire subject of this story is the difference between protecting somebody and managing them.

I took long-term leave on the Monday morning.

Not the day after. Not in the corridor. The Monday, six days later, after I had sat in a hospital chair for a week working out that there was no arrangement I could make, no unit I could ring, and no person I could deploy who would be any use to my own daughter at three in the morning except me.

Twenty-two years. It took me six days to understand that the thing she needed was somebody in a chair.

And I want to record how I spent those six days, because it is not flattering and because it is the most useful thing in here for anybody who is built the way I am built.