As the tanks rolled into the streets of Bangkok last year, calling a halt to 14 years of civilian rule in Thailand, then-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra was thousands of miles away in New York at the United Nations General Assembly.
Far from the action, Thaksin could do little to stop the military takeover. He has since been barred from returning to Thailand.
Holed up in Bangkok, though, was his wife, Pojaman Shinawatra. In the frenzied hours after the coup, there was speculation that she might be detained along with key Thaksin lieutenants who were in custody.
Instead, Pojaman was given an army and police guard outside her luxury house and allowed to sit tight with two of her children, while Thaksin headed to London where he owns property.
Within days, Pojaman was on her way to London to join her husband and begin a battle to defend the family's wealth and status in Thailand.
A month later, she was back in Bangkok, mixing in elite circles and ready to go toe-to-toe with the country's new military powerbrokers.
It's a role that comes naturally to Pojaman, 50, a scion of a prominent police family whom some observers saw as the brain behind her husband's political and economic rise to power.