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.

There was a sound in my ears like a struck bell.

Our marriage certificate is in the top drawer of the nightstand at Quarry Row. Our wedding photograph takes up half the bedroom wall — I chose the frame, it was too expensive, we argued about it. I could recite our vows right now, both sides, including the part he added at the last minute that made my aunt cry.

I asked her to show me a picture of the wedding.

What color she had went out of her face. She said she didn’t have one with her.

I said: then anything. Any photo on your phone of the two of you.

Desmond’s jaw set and he said that was enough, that Pia was very ill.

And she started coughing then — properly, the deep kind — and he was at her side in one step with a hand on her shoulder and a cup already in the other, and I have never in my life watched anything more practiced.