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.

There is no marriage. I checked. There is no license anywhere in this state or the two adjoining it.

He never married her. He simply told her they were married, and she was thirty-eight and dying and she believed the only person who came every day.

I found that out in September, in that corner room, when he was downstairs.

I did not tell her. I want that on the record, because Harriet advised me to and I did not do it.

She worked it out herself. She was not a stupid woman; she had been a structural engineer before she got sick.

She asked me one question. She said: he calls you Sylvie in the same voice.

And I said yes.

And she closed her eyes and did not open them for a while.

Then she asked me how long we had been married, and I told her three years, and she did the arithmetic out loud — because she had been an engineer and that is what engineers do with a bad number, they say it in the room — and she worked out that he had been telling her about the small ceremony at her father’s house during the same autumn he was choosing a frame for our wedding photograph.