After a car accident I pretended to have amnesia as a joke. My husband looked at the floor and told me he was my brother — and it took me eleven days to work out that the only thing I had actually forgotten was the two hours before the crash, and that those two hours were the whole story.

Two pairs of slippers by the rug. One navy, one pink, size six, which is not my size.

Two toothbrushes in a cup in the bathroom.

A kitchen with food in it — real food, a stocked kitchen, oat milk and the bitter marmalade he likes and a pack of the ginger chews that people take for nausea. My husband has not bought groceries at our house in three years. He has genuinely never known where we keep the flour.

There was a blanket folded over the arm of the sofa the way you fold a blanket when you live somewhere.

There was a laundry basket in the hall with a load in it, half his and half hers.

There was a repeat prescription with her name on it magneted to the fridge, and beside it a takeaway menu with a dish circled in pen, and the pen was his pen, the fine one he is precious about.