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 she said: this is nice.

That is all. That is the entire content of that phone call, and I have thought about it a great deal more than about the corridor.

I had eleven of those calls.

I was in the room for every single one of them.

I was on the line, in the car, in an office, once on a runway, being warm and being pleased to hear from her and being, in every single case, the first one to speak.

Forty-six minutes in total, across fourteen months, of my daughter trying.

And I never once stopped talking long enough to let her say it.