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 detail I keep going back to and it is not the one anybody expects.

Her phone was face down on the blanket.

Face down. In an observation bay, on her own, with nobody in the room.

Fourteen months of a habit, still running, in a hospital, after everything — a woman who had learned to put her phone face down even when there was no one there to see it.

She said: Mum.

I am not going to describe what I was looking at. She is thirty-one years old and it is hers and not mine.

I have been asked for those details four separate times since, by people who meant no harm, and I have not given them and I am not starting here.

What I will say is that I did not ask her a single question.

Not one, in the first forty minutes, and I have been told since by somebody qualified that it was the only thing I got completely right in that entire week.

I sat down. I put my hand on the blanket, near her hand and not on it, and I did not ask her anything at all.

Because the first question in a room like that — any question, however gentle — is a request for an account.