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.

So I got in the car, and I let him drive, and at the intersection where he should have turned left toward the apartment of a friend I have never heard of, his phone rang through the car speakers.

Pia’s voice came out of the dashboard. She said: my love. Did you get Sylvie there safely? Don’t worry about me, I can manage the biopsy on my own.

His knuckles went white on the wheel.

He put his right indicator on.

We drove back toward the medical center and past it, four blocks, and he pulled into an underground garage at a building called Fennimore Court.

He said, while we were still in the car with the engine off: I bought a place near the hospital a few months ago. For when her treatments are bad.

I said nothing. The amnesiac sister has no opinions.

He unlocked the door on the ninth floor and I walked into an apartment I had never seen, in a building I had never heard of, that my husband owned.