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 said: my actual brother? and I put my hand out toward him and said something about having landed a suspiciously good-looking family.

He stepped back out of reach. He said: by blood, Sylvie. Stop being ridiculous.

That was so strange — the stepping back, the by blood — that I kept going.

For four days I played the amnesiac little sister.

He brought me meals. He tucked the blanket around my feet the way he has done a hundred times. He talked to me with that careful, quiet tenderness that I have known since our second date, and he called me Sylvie in the voice he uses at two in the morning.

I kept waiting for him to break.

He never broke. Not once, not for a second, in four days.

And somewhere around the third afternoon the joke stopped being a joke and became something I was doing on purpose, for a reason I could not have explained to you at the time.