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.

But I have done twenty-two years of choosing the mission in a hundred small ways that never once looked like a choice.

This is one year where I do not.

I am taking a year.

And that year is not a sacrifice and I will not have it described as one, because a sacrifice is a thing you did not owe.

She asked me about it in the car, in the May, on the way back from something, looking out of the window in the way they do when they want to be able to pretend they did not ask.

She said: so do you have to go back?

And I said yes, eventually.

And she said: okay.

And then, about a mile later: I just wanted to know which one it was.

I asked her what she meant, and she took another half mile, and then she said it.

She said: whether you’d come because it was bad enough, or whether you’d have come anyway.

Thirty-one years old, in a car, looking out of a window.

She was not asking about my leave. She was asking me to tell her, retrospectively, what the threshold had been all her life — because she has never known, and she has been estimating it since she was nine.