(Ten years ago she was nothing like that. She and Nick slept till noon every Sunday morning. “How will they ever find time to renovate that enormous house!” clucked Mum and Frannie and me, like elderly aunts.)

She didn’t see me at first and as I walked up to her, her eyes flickered, and they looked so big and blue in her pale face, but more importantly, she was looking at me in a different, but familiar, way. I don’t know how to describe it, except that the strange thought came into my head, “You’re back.”

You want to know the first thing she said to me, Dr. Hodges?

She said, “Oh Libby, what happened to you?”

I told you, it defines me.

Alice had finally been moved up to a ward and given a hospital gown and a remote for the television and a white chest of drawers. A lady wheeling a trolley brought her a cup of weak tea and four tiny triangular curried-egg sandwiches. The nurse was right; the tea and sandwiches had made her feel better, except they hadn’t done anything about the huge gaping crevasse in her memory.

When she’d heard Elisabeth’s voice on the mobile phone, it was just like each time she’d called home on that disastrous trip around Europe when she was nineteen and trying to pretend she had a different personality—an adventurous, extroverted sort of personality; the sort of person who loves exploring cathedrals and ruins all day on her own and talking to drunk boys from Brisbane in youth hostels at night—when really she was homesick and lonely and often bored, and couldn’t make head or tail of the train timetables. The sound of Elisabeth’s voice, loud and clear in a strange phone box on the other side of the world, always made Alice’s knees buckle with relief, and she’d press her forehead against the glass and think, That’s right; I am a real person.

“My sister is coming right now,” she told the nurse when she hung up, as if giving her credentials as a proper person with a family; a family she recognized.

Although, when Elisabeth first walked toward her bed, she actually didn’t recognize her. She vaguely assumed that this woman in the cream suit with the glasses and the swinging shoulder-length hair must be a hospital administrator coming to do something administrative, but then something about the woman’s straight-backed “I’ll take you on” posture, something essentially Elisabeth, gave her away.

It was a shock, because it seemed that overnight Elisabeth had put on a lot of weight. She’d always had a strong, lithe, athletic-looking body, because of her rowing and her jogging and whatever else it was she was always so busy doing. Now she wasn’t fat but definitely larger, softer, and bustier; a puffed-out version of herself, as if someone had blown her up like a plastic pool toy. She won’t like that, thought Alice. Elisabeth had always been so amusingly moralistic about fattening food, refusing an offer of pavlova as if it were crack cocaine. Once, when Nick, Alice, and Elisabeth went away for a weekend together, Elisabeth spent ages at the breakfast table studying the “nutritional information” panel on the side of a container of yogurt, warning them darkly, “You have to be really careful with yogurt.” Whenever Nick and Alice ate yogurt after that, one of them would always shout, “Careful!”

As she got closer and the bright light over Alice’s bed lit up her face, Alice saw fine spidery lines etched around Elisabeth’s mouth and on either side of her eyes behind the elegant spectacles. Elisabeth had large, pale blue eyes with dark lashes, like Alice, inherited from their father; eyes that attracted compliments, but now they seemed smaller and paler, as if the color had begun to wash out.

There was something bruised and wary and worn out about those washed-out eyes, as if she’d just been badly defeated in a fight she’d expected to win.

Alice felt a surge of worry; something terrible must have happened.

But when she asked, Elisabeth said, “What do you mean what happened to me?” so briskly and spiritedly that Alice doubted herself.

Elisabeth pulled over a plastic chair and sat down. Alice caught a glimpse of her skirt pulling unflatteringly across her stomach and quickly looked away; it made her want to cry.

Elisabeth said, “You’re the one in hospital. The question is what happened to you?”

Alice felt herself slip into the role of irrepressible, hopeless Alice. “It’s completely bizarre. It’s like a dream. Apparently, I fell over at the gym. Me, at the gym! I know! According to Jane Turner I was doing something called my ‘Friday spin class.’ ” She could be silly now, because Elisabeth was here to be sensible.

Elisabeth stared at her with such grim, frightened concentration that Alice felt her silly grin drift away.

She reached out for the photo she’d left sitting on the chest of drawers next to her bed and handed it to Elisabeth, saying in a small, polite voice, “Are these my . . .” She felt more foolish than she’d ever felt in her life. “Are these my children?”

Elisabeth took the photo, glanced at it, and something complicated crossed her face, a barely perceptible tremor, and vanished. She smiled carefully and said, “Yes, Alice.”

Alice took a deep, shaky breath and closed her eyes. “I’ve never seen them before.”

She heard Elisabeth take a deep breath herself. “It’s just temporary, I’m sure. You probably just need to rest, to relax and—”

“What are they like?” Alice opened her eyes. “Those children. Are they . . . nice?”

Elisabeth said in a stronger voice, “They’re wonderful, Alice.”