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 said I knew that.

She said: no. Listen. I have four weeks and I am not going to spend one of them being someone’s excuse.

And then she said: get me a notary.

PART 5
Pia Brandt gave a sworn statement on the twenty-first of September in a private room at Bellhaven, with a notary, a nurse as a second witness, and Harriet Nunn asking the questions.

It ran nine pages. She stopped four times.

She died on the eleventh of October.

I saw her twice more before that. Neither visit was long and neither of them was about him.

The second time she asked me to describe our house. Not for any reason — she said she was tired of the ceiling and wanted a different room to be in.

So I described Quarry Row for about twenty minutes. The magnolia. The step that gives. The bad kitchen light. She fell asleep somewhere around the upstairs landing and I sat there until the nurse came.

I have never been able to decide whether that was a kindness I did her or one she did me, and it is the only twenty minutes of that entire year I would live again.

I was not there at the end. Desmond was, and I have never begrudged him that, and I would not have wanted to be.

The rest of it went the way these things go, which is slowly and on paper.

Wexford Savings’ fraud unit had a forensic document examiner named Winnifred Ochs look at four signatures. Her report is fifty-one pages and its conclusion runs to one line.

The equity line was voided against the house. That took nine months and it is the single largest thing that happened to me in the whole account, because it meant Quarry Row was mine and had always been mine.

The criminal side is still going. It has been two years. Harriet says another year, possibly two. There is a real chance that the worst thing that ever happens to him is a suspended sentence and a repayment schedule.

I have made my peace with that and I want to say how, because it took a while.

For about eight months I wanted a sentence. I wanted a number of years said out loud in a room by somebody in a robe, and I was extremely honest with Harriet about wanting it, and she was extremely honest back, which is that the system does not sell that and I should not spend two years shopping for it.

What I have instead is fifty-one pages by Winnifred Ochs, and nine pages sworn by a woman who was four weeks from dying and used one of them on this.

Those two documents exist. They will keep existing. Nobody can talk me out of what happened in a lobby at Bellhaven, because two strangers with no reason to care wrote it down.

Carrow put him on leave in the spring and did not bring him back. The department did not have to be told twice; a colleague of his had already spent a year quietly not asking about the second apartment.

Fennimore Court sold in March. The proceeds went where they were always going to go, which is against the debt, and there was not much left over.

The divorce was uncontested. He did not fight one line of it. His lawyer’s letters were four sentences long.

I only saw him once after the lobby. Not by arrangement — in a supermarket in Alderport, in November, three weeks after her funeral, and neither of us said anything at all.

I have been asked, more than once, whether I forgive him for Pia.

That is the wrong question and I have finally learned how to say why.

He did not ruin my life to keep a dying woman alive. If he had come to me in the first week — if he had sat down at the table at Quarry Row and said, Otto’s money is gone and she is thirty-eight and she has nobody, and I need to remortgage the house — I would have said yes.

I want that written down plainly. I would have said yes. It would have been the worst conversation of our marriage and I would have said yes by the end of it.

What he could not do was ask.

He would rather forge my name four hundred and ten thousand dollars’ worth than sit across a table and be told no by his wife, and when the chance came to make me not his wife at all, he took it in a second and a half without blinking.

That is what I know about him now. Everything else is detail.

I cleared the apartment myself, in February, because I wanted to and because Harriet said I was allowed to.

I did the kitchen and the closets and the bathroom last.

There were two toothbrushes in a cup by the sink. Hers had been there since August and she had not used it since August, and he had not moved it, and I stood there for a long time before I understood that of course he hadn’t.

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