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.

Three — and she said this last and slowly — a person who has forged a signature once has generally forged it more than once, and I should stop thinking of the hundred and eighty thousand as the number.

It was not the number.

Otto Brandt died six years ago and his money was substantial and it was gone by the second year, because Pia’s protocol is out of network, and because there is an infusion she has been on for eleven months that costs a little over twenty-two thousand dollars a month, and because the private room at Bellhaven is nine hundred a night.

Between the equity line, a personal loan, two credit accounts in my name that I have never held a card for, and eleven withdrawals from an investment account my mother left me, the total is a little over four hundred and ten thousand dollars.

The last withdrawal is dated two days after my accident.