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.

Two days. I was in a bed on the third floor with a dressing on my eyebrow and my husband was signing my name in an office across town.

And then Harriet found the other thing, which was not money.

Desmond had called a firm in Alderport on the Wednesday — the day after the crash, the day after I woke up and said who are you — and asked for a consultation regarding temporary guardianship of an adult family member following a traumatic brain injury.

He used the phrase cognitive impairment. It is in their intake note. Harriet has a copy.

He had not filed anything. He may never have filed anything. I have gone around and around on whether he actually would have.

Harriet has a view. She has watched this for thirty-one years and she says that the call is the fact, and that whether he filed is a question about his nerve rather than about his intention.