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 got in the car and I drove toward Fennimore Court, and I never got there, because a delivery van went through the light at Vesper Road at four in the afternoon.

That is the whole thing. That is what the two hours contained.

I had faked losing my memory as a joke, in a hospital bed, twenty hours after actually losing the only two hours that mattered.

And my husband had looked at a woman who could not remember why she’d been driving, and he had made a decision in about one second, and he had said: I’m your brother.

I want to be fair, and this is the closest to fair I can get.

I do not think he planned it. I have never thought he planned it. Pia was three floors up in the same building, on the same insurance, in the same system, and a nurse could have said the wrong sentence in either room at any moment of any day.