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

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.

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.

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.