Standing should not have been possible, and I want to be honest that I had not been certain it would be.

In the days of secret rehabilitation the protection unit had arranged — physiotherapists brought in quietly, my progress kept off the chart Emiliano was allowed to see — I had gotten as far as a few unsteady steps between parallel bars, gripping them white-knuckled, a therapist’s arm always within reach.

No one had ever let go.

And here there were no bars and no therapist, only a room full of my husband’s investors and a wheelchair I was pushing myself up out of on legs that had forgotten, six weeks earlier, how to hold me at all.

The pain of it was extraordinary.

But I had decided, lying awake the night before, that I would not deliver the truth about my family from a chair.