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.

That is not cowardice and I have stopped describing it that way.

It is what happens when a man in a four-thousand-dollar suit speaks calmly in a public place. He did not raise his voice once. He was perfectly polite.

Everything that made it possible for twenty people to stand still was in his volume.

And the lawyer behind him already had the folder open.

Not reaching into a case. Open, in both hands, at one particular page. His briefcase was closed on the floor by his shoe.

Which means it had been opened at that page before either of them came round the corner.

I did not read it that night. I want to be accurate about that, because the version people prefer has me reading it in the corridor and going white.

I did not take it and I did not look at it. I said four words back to Ridley, and I have been asked what they were about nine times, and they were:

Take your hand off.

He did. Immediately, and without any fuss at all, which told me something else about him.

Then I went back into that room and shut the door and sat down, and they were still in that corridor forty minutes later, and they left at about a quarter past nine.