At my divorce hearing the judge ruled I’d leave with nothing. My husband leaned down and told me to see how long I’d last. Then the courtroom doors went.

That telephone call is about ninety seconds long.

I have thought about those ninety seconds approximately four hundred times in the last year and I will go on thinking about them.

Because I had it.

I had my hand on the whole of it, at eighteen years old, on a Tuesday afternoon in the February of 2020.

A woman in an office in Marren, on a telephone, who would have had to say something — anything — if I had asked her one more question.

And I asked none.

Here is why.

I have had to be walked all the way to this, by a woman whose job it is, over about eleven months of Thursday afternoons.

I was eighteen years old. I had been in that system from the age of five and five months.

And the single most reliable thing I learned in thirteen years in it is this.

When something good arrives, you do not ask about it.