She put the letter down and she said: “I want to be extremely clear with you about what I am about to say, because I am going to give you advice and then I am going to tell you not to take it.”

She said the money was real and the offer was excellent and that in her professional judgement, as a matter of the family case and nothing else, I should take it, and that she would be failing me if she did not say so in those words.

She said that fighting it would take between fourteen months and three years, that I would win less, that I would spend a great deal of what I won, and that the thing I actually wanted — which she identified, correctly, without my having told her — was not obtainable in a family court under any circumstances.

And then she said: “And you are not going to take it, and I know that, and here is what I want you to understand about why.

“It is not because paragraph fourteen is wicked.

It is not.