My parents threw me out at sixteen after I lost my leg. Nineteen years later they wanted a million dollars for my sister — to hide why a 24 -year-old woman may never walk again.

I said I had no relationship with that organisation.

And she said something warm about how modest that was, and moved on to the next question, and the room laughed, and that was that.

Afterwards I rang my lawyer and asked what it would take to get my name off a charity I had nothing to do with.

She was very good and very clear.

She said: we’d have to sue, and they’d defend it, and it becomes a public record. The hospital. Your parents. The bin bag. All of it, in a filing, and then in the press, with your face on it.

She said: it’s your call. But you should know what it costs.

I thought about it for about a week.

And then I let them keep it.

I was thirty-eight months into a company that was finally working. I had spent eleven years being a credit report and a police file and a case number, and I had just got to the point where nobody in a meeting knew anything about me except what I told them.