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.

He had about a second and a half, and he improvised, and then he had to build seven days on top of it.

But the loan was eleven days before the crash. The apartment was four months before that. The signature on the loan application — and I have seen it, at a table in Harriet Nunn’s office with a magnifier — is a competent, unhurried, careful forgery of my name.

That took an afternoon and a steady hand. That was not a second and a half.

And there is one more thing about the letter in the glove box that I have never been able to put down.

It was refolded.

Not crumpled, not shoved. Folded back along its original creases and returned to its envelope, which is a thing I do, which is a thing I have done with every piece of paper I have ever been upset by, and which is the single most me detail in this entire account.