I read that schedule at about twenty past three on a Monday afternoon.
And I knew, by about twenty-five past, that I had to declare it. That is not hindsight. There is a form. I have filled it in before, in 2023, over a cousin.
It takes eleven minutes.
And I did not do it on the Monday, and I did not do it on the Tuesday, and on the Wednesday the letter went out to the company and I knew that too.
Seven days.
And when the colonel asked me in the November why I had not declared it on the thirteenth, I gave her an answer about workload that was not true, and she let me have it, and then she asked me again in the January and I told her the real one.
Which is that the moment I declared it, it stopped being mine.
Somebody else would have handled it. The group would have managed the conflict in about a day and I would have gone back to my work and my sister would have married a man on the eighteenth of October knowing nothing, and I would have known, and there would have been nothing I could do.
