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.

And on the shelf by the door there was a bowl with keys in it. Two sets. Both his.

I stood in the middle of that room with a cracked rib and a dressing over my eyebrow and I understood that I was not looking at an affair.

An affair is a hotel. An affair is a phone face-down.

This was a household.

He put my bag down and said he’d stay on the sofa, and I said, in the mild interested voice of a woman meeting her brother’s home for the first time, that it was a lovely apartment.

And then I went into the second bedroom and shut the door and sat on the end of the bed for about an hour.

On the third night, I found the envelope.

It was in the drawer of the hall console under a phone charger and a parking permit. Wexford Savings, addressed to Fennimore Court, unopened, thick.