“Oh, Alice,” said Elisabeth sadly. “I promise you, it’s just your head injury, it’s just . . . oh, hi there, hi!”

A nurse Alice hadn’t seen before pulled back the curtain briskly on their cubicle and Elisabeth greeted her with obvious relief.

“How are you feeling?” The nurse pumped up the blood-pressure strap around Alice’s arm once again.

“I’m fine,” said Alice resignedly. She knew the drill now. Blood pressure. Pupils. Questions.

“Your blood pressure has soared from the last time I checked,” commented the nurse, making a note on her chart.

My husband just yelled at me like I was his worst enemy. My lovely Nick. My Nick. I want to tell him about it, because he’d be so angry if he ever heard somebody speak to me like that. He’s the first person I want to tell when somebody upsets me; my foot pressing on the accelerator, desperate to get home from work just to tell him, the moment I tell him, the moment his face lights up with fury on my behalf, it’s better, it’s fixed.

Nick, you will never believe how this man spoke to me. You will want to punch him in the nose when you hear. Except it’s so strange, because it was you, Nick, you were the man.

“She’s had a few shocks,” said Elisabeth.

“We really need you to try and stay relaxed.” The nurse leaned close and did something feathery-quick with her fingers to pull back Alice’s eyelids while she shone her miniature torch into each pupil. The nurse’s perfume reminded Alice of something—someone?—but of course the feeling vanished as soon as the nurse moved. Was this going to be her from now on—a permanent, irritating case of déjà vu like an itchy rash?

“Now I’m just going to ask you a few boring questions again. What’s your name?”

“Alice Mary Love.”

“And where are you and what are you doing here?”

“I’m at Royal North Shore Hospital because I hit my head at the gym.”

“And what day is it?”

“It’s Friday, 2 May . . . 2008.”

“Good, excellent!” The nurse turned to Elisabeth, as if expecting her to be impressed. “We’re just checking that her cognitive reasoning isn’t affected by her injury.”

Elisabeth blinked irritably. “Yes, okay, great, but she still thinks it’s 1998.”

Tattletale, thought Alice.

“I do not,” she said. “I know it’s 2008. I just said that.”

“But she still doesn’t remember anything since 1998. Or hardly anything. She doesn’t remember her children. She doesn’t remember her marriage breakup.”

Her marriage breakup. Her marriage was something that could be sliced up like a pizza.

Alice closed her eyes and thought of Nick’s face, creased from sleep, lying on the pillow next to hers on a Sunday morning. Sometimes in the morning his hair would be all spiked up in the middle of his head. “You’ve got a Mohawk,” said Alice the first time she observed this phenomenon. “Of course,” he said. “It’s Sunday. Mohawk day.” Even with his eyes closed, he knew when she was awake, lying there, looking at him, thinking hopefully that he might bring her a cup of tea in bed. “No,” he would say, before she’d even asked. “Don’t even think about it, woman.” But he always got it for her.

Alice would give anything, anything at all, to be lying in bed right now with Nick, waiting for a cup of tea. Maybe he got sick of making her cups of tea? Was that it? Had she taken him for granted? Who did she think she was, some sort of princess, lying in bed waiting for cups of tea to be delivered, without even brushing her teeth? She wasn’t pretty enough to get away with that sort of behavior. She should have jumped up before he woke, done her hair and makeup and made him pancakes and strawberries, wearing a long lacy nightgown. That was how you kept a marriage alive, for God’s sake, it wasn’t as if there wasn’t enough advice around in every women’s magazine she’d ever read. It was basic knowledge! She felt as though she’d been unforgivably negligent—careless! sloppy!—with the most precious, wonderful gift she’d ever received.

Alice could hear Elisabeth murmuring urgently to the nurse, asking if she could see the doctor, wanting to know what tests had been done. “How do you know she hasn’t got some sort of clot in her brain?” Elisabeth’s voice rose a bit hysterically, and Alice smiled to herself. Drama queen.

(Although, could there be a clot? A dark, ominous thing swooping about in her head like an evil bat? Yes, they really should look into that.)

Maybe Nick had got bored with her. Was that it? Once, when she was in high school, she overheard a girl saying, “Oh, Alice, she’s okay, but she’s a nothing sort of person.”

A nothing sort of person. The girl had said it so casually, without malice, as if it were a fact, and at fourteen Alice had felt cold with the official confirmation of what she’d always believed. Yes, of course she was boring, she bored herself silly! Other people’s personalities were so much more substantial. That same year, a boy at the bowling alley leaned in close with the sweet smell of Coke on his breath and said, “You’ve got a face like a pig.” And that just confirmed something else she’d always suspected; her mother was wrong when she said her nose was as cute as a button; it wasn’t a nose, it was a snout.

(The boy had a skinny, tiny-eyed face like a rat. She was twenty-five before it occurred to her that she could have insulted him back, but the rule of life was that the boys got to decide which girls were pretty; it didn’t really matter how ugly they were themselves.)