It is a kind of grief, that state, though it doesn’t feel like grief; it is the moment you stop treating someone as a partner and start treating them as an opponent, and for me it had always carried a small private sadness even in the boardroom, because it meant a relationship had failed.

Standing in that closet, I felt it settle over my own mother and brother, and the sadness was there under it, but so was the clarity, and the clarity was useful.

I was not going to out-shout them; they were better at shouting.

I was not going to appeal to their consciences; I had just heard, in detail, that they didn’t have the kind I’d been assuming.

I was going to do the one thing I was actually good at, the thing they had spent a decade underestimating because it didn’t look like strength to them.