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.

He said: You’re my sister. That’s what this whole building has heard all week.

Nobody moved. The young man at the desk took his hands off the keyboard.

He leaned in close and said:

You don’t remember your own name. Who would believe you?

And then, still holding my arm:

Now get in the car. Well?

PART 2

I got in the car.

I want to explain that, because it is the decision the entire rest of this rests on, and because people who hear this story always want me to have made a scene in that lobby.

Here is what went through my head in those four seconds.

If I said I remember everything in a hospital lobby, then by six o’clock that evening I would be a woman with a head injury making an accusation, and he would be a professor with a dying wife, and I would have won a shouting match and lost every single thing that came after it.