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.

The moment I stopped being an amnesiac, I became a problem he had to manage.

While I was an amnesiac, I was furniture. And furniture gets left alone in rooms.

There was a second thing, underneath, that took me much longer to admit to myself.

I wanted to see how far he would go.

Not in a cold way. I was standing in a hospital lobby with a cracked rib and I had just been told by my husband of three years that I was his sister, and some part of me that I do not especially like was already thinking: keep going. Say the next one. I want to hear all of it.

Three years of a man who never raised his voice, never lied about anything smaller than this, corrected waiters’ grammar and apologized for four days — and he had a whole other apartment.

I did not want to stop him. I wanted the rest of the inventory.