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.

Then on the fourth day he stood at the window with his back to me and said there was someone I needed to meet, and that his wife was on the fourth floor.

He walked me down there himself, one hand hovering behind my elbow.

Corner room, private. There was a woman in the bed. Very thin, skin like paper, eyes enormous in her face the way they go.

She smiled at me. She said she was so glad I was all right.

She said: I’m Pia. Your sister-in-law.

I turned around and looked at my husband and said: your wife?

He nodded. Once.

Pia told me they had known each other since they were sixteen. That her father had paid for Desmond’s doctorate when he had nothing to his name. That they’d grown up two streets apart in Alderport and that it had turned into love the way those things do.