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.

Fennimore Court sold in March. The proceeds went where they were always going to go, which is against the debt, and there was not much left over.

The divorce was uncontested. He did not fight one line of it. His lawyer’s letters were four sentences long.

I only saw him once after the lobby. Not by arrangement — in a supermarket in Alderport, in November, three weeks after her funeral, and neither of us said anything at all.

I have been asked, more than once, whether I forgive him for Pia.

That is the wrong question and I have finally learned how to say why.

He did not ruin my life to keep a dying woman alive. If he had come to me in the first week — if he had sat down at the table at Quarry Row and said, Otto’s money is gone and she is thirty-eight and she has nobody, and I need to remortgage the house — I would have said yes.