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 want that written down plainly. I would have said yes. It would have been the worst conversation of our marriage and I would have said yes by the end of it.

What he could not do was ask.

He would rather forge my name four hundred and ten thousand dollars’ worth than sit across a table and be told no by his wife, and when the chance came to make me not his wife at all, he took it in a second and a half without blinking.

That is what I know about him now. Everything else is detail.

I cleared the apartment myself, in February, because I wanted to and because Harriet said I was allowed to.

I did the kitchen and the closets and the bathroom last.

There were two toothbrushes in a cup by the sink. Hers had been there since August and she had not used it since August, and he had not moved it, and I stood there for a long time before I understood that of course he hadn’t.