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.

But I did the arithmetic on that ward at two in the morning, and it is very simple arithmetic.

Whatever I was doing on that Tuesday, I was doing it alone, at four in the afternoon, on a road I have no business being on.

And when I woke up unable to account for it, the first thing my husband did was tell me I was somebody else.

So on the sixth day I called a taxi while Desmond was at the hospital, and I went to the impound lot on Kell Street with my registration and my driver’s license and forty-one dollars in cash.

The car was a write-off. The whole front left was gone.

The glove box opened on the second try.

Inside there were the manual, an ice scraper, a packet of tissues, and a letter from Wexford Savings addressed to me at Quarry Row, opened, refolded, and put back in its envelope.