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 have never been able to decide whether that was a kindness I did her or one she did me, and it is the only twenty minutes of that entire year I would live again.

I was not there at the end. Desmond was, and I have never begrudged him that, and I would not have wanted to be.

The rest of it went the way these things go, which is slowly and on paper.

Wexford Savings’ fraud unit had a forensic document examiner named Winnifred Ochs look at four signatures. Her report is fifty-one pages and its conclusion runs to one line.

The equity line was voided against the house. That took nine months and it is the single largest thing that happened to me in the whole account, because it meant Quarry Row was mine and had always been mine.

The criminal side is still going. It has been two years. Harriet says another year, possibly two. There is a real chance that the worst thing that ever happens to him is a suspended sentence and a repayment schedule.