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 walked out of that room without saying a word.

He caught up to me in the stairwell and gave me a piece of the truth.

Stage four, in the lung, and it had gone to the bone. Her father Otto had paid for his education and for his grandmother’s care in the years when nobody else would, and before the old man died he had made Desmond swear to look after her.

A few months at the outside, he said, to the stairs rather than to me. I just want to see her through it.

I said: take me home. To Quarry Row.

He said no.

We were in the main lobby by then, moving toward the doors. Twenty people, easily — the coffee counter, the information desk, an old woman waiting in a wheelchair, a security guard by the glass.

He took hold of my elbow and turned me away from the doors toward the side corridor, and he did not lower his voice.