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.

She said: people do not call that number to find out what their options are. They call it to find out how hard it is.

I asked her what the honest answer to that question is, in this state, for a spouse with a documented brain injury and a treating physician who has written the words post-concussive cognitive impairment in a chart.

She said: not very.

But it took him under forty-eight hours to convert my worst joke into a legal strategy, and I know what I know about the man I was married to, and I have stopped arguing with myself about it.

Now Pia.

I have to be careful here because there is a version of this where she is a villain and that version is a lie.

Pia Brandt did not know I existed.

She believed she had been married to Desmond for six years. She had a ring. She had a story about a small ceremony at her father’s house that she could tell you in detail, and she could tell it in detail because he had told it to her.