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.

Dated eleven days before the accident.

It was a standard notification of the sort a bank sends when a loan account is opened. Home equity line of credit, secured against the property at Quarry Row. One hundred and eighty thousand dollars, drawn in full, in three tranches.

It listed the disbursement address for the correspondence.

Fennimore Court, unit 906.

I read the address four times before it did anything. I had been sleeping in that building for two nights. I had made tea in that kitchen that morning.

I sat in the driver’s seat of my own wrecked car in a gravel lot in the middle of the afternoon and everything came back, and it came back all at once and it was not gentle.

I had opened that letter on a Tuesday morning. I had stood in my own kitchen and read it twice and then looked up the address on my phone at the counter. I remember the countertop. I remember that I did not call him, because if I called him he would have an hour to think.