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: I want you to know I would not have let him.

I said I knew that.

She said: no. Listen. I have four weeks and I am not going to spend one of them being someone’s excuse.

And then she said: get me a notary.

PART 5

Pia Brandt gave a sworn statement on the twenty-first of September in a private room at Bellhaven, with a notary, a nurse as a second witness, and Harriet Nunn asking the questions.

It ran nine pages. She stopped four times.

She died on the eleventh of October.

I saw her twice more before that. Neither visit was long and neither of them was about him.

The second time she asked me to describe our house. Not for any reason — she said she was tired of the ceiling and wanted a different room to be in.

So I described Quarry Row for about twenty minutes. The magnolia. The step that gives. The bad kitchen light. She fell asleep somewhere around the upstairs landing and I sat there until the nurse came.