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.

I did not open it. I photographed the front of it, put it back exactly as it was, and went to bed.

I have never been so awake in my life.

Because there was one thing I had not been able to make fit for three days, and looking at that envelope it finally moved.

Everybody had told me I’d been in an accident on the Vesper Road overpass at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday.

And I could not remember one single second of that Tuesday.

Not the crash — nobody remembers the crash. I could not remember waking up. I could not remember breakfast. I could not remember why I would have been anywhere near Vesper Road, which is nowhere near my office, nowhere near our house, and nowhere near anything I have ever had a reason to drive to.

I had been faking amnesia for four days.