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.

I made lists. I made a contact matrix. I rang a friend in the JAG corps at eleven at night on the Wednesday.

I produced, in six days, a genuinely excellent plan involving eleven people, four of whom would have been extremely effective.

And on the Sunday night she woke up at about three and I heard it through a wall, and I went and sat on the end of that bed and said nothing for about twenty minutes.

And in the morning she said: that was the first time I’ve slept since it happened.

Twenty minutes of a woman sitting on a bed doing nothing, against six days of a plan involving a JAG colonel.

I know which one I am better at. That is not the same as knowing which one was needed.

I am not leaving.

I want to be clear about that, because people assume a story like this ends with a woman handing back her career, and it does not, and I would not respect the woman in that version.

I have commanded. I am good at it. Somebody has to do it and there is no argument in this world that makes the world better by me stopping.