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 made my peace with that and I want to say how, because it took a while.

For about eight months I wanted a sentence. I wanted a number of years said out loud in a room by somebody in a robe, and I was extremely honest with Harriet about wanting it, and she was extremely honest back, which is that the system does not sell that and I should not spend two years shopping for it.

What I have instead is fifty-one pages by Winnifred Ochs, and nine pages sworn by a woman who was four weeks from dying and used one of them on this.

Those two documents exist. They will keep existing. Nobody can talk me out of what happened in a lobby at Bellhaven, because two strangers with no reason to care wrote it down.

Carrow put him on leave in the spring and did not bring him back. The department did not have to be told twice; a colleague of his had already spent a year quietly not asking about the second apartment.