“Oh,” she said in sudden panic. “The children. Are the children in there?”

“They’re with Nick’s mother. It’s his weekend for the kids. Nick is back from Portugal tomorrow morning. So he’ll drop them back to you Sunday night, as usual.”

“As usual,” repeated Alice faintly.

“Apparently that’s your usual procedure,” said Elisabeth apologetically.

“Right,” said Alice.

Elisabeth took the glass of orange juice from Alice’s unresisting fingers. “Shall we go inside? You probably need to lie down for a while. You still look so pale.”

Alice looked around her. Something was missing.

“Where are George and Mildred?” she said.

“I don’t know who George and Mildred are,” said Elisabeth in a gentle, dealing-with-crazy-person-here voice.

“That’s what we called the sandstone lions.” Alice gestured at the empty spot on the veranda. “The old lady left them for us. We love them.”

“Oh. Yes, I think I remember them. I expect you got rid of them. Not quite the look for you, Alice.”

Alice didn’t understand what she meant. She and Nick would never have got rid of the lions. “Just off to the shops, George and Mildred,” they’d say as they left the house. “You’re in charge.”

Nick would know. She would ask him. She turned around and lifted the keys to the door. The locks were new to her. There was a solid-looking gold dead bolt, but her fingers instantly found the right key, holding down the door handle and pushing with her shoulder against the door in a practiced, smooth movement. It was extraordinary the way her body knew how to do things—the mobile phone, the makeup, the lock—without her mind remembering her ever having done them before. She was about to comment on this to Elisabeth, but then she saw the hallway and she couldn’t speak.

“Okay, listen to me, because I am a visionary,” Nick had said standing in the musty, dark hallway in the first shell-shocked week after they’d moved into the house. (His mother had cried when she saw the house.) “Imagine sunlight flooding through this hallway because of the skylights we’ll put here, here, and here. Imagine all this wallpaper gone and the walls painted something like a pale green. Imagine this carpet gone somewhere far, far away and the floorboards varnished and shiny in the sunlight. Imagine a hall table with flowers and letters on a silver tray, you know, as if they’ve been left there by the butler, and an umbrella stand and a hat stand. Imagine photos of our adorable children lined along the hallway—not those horrible portrait shots—but real photos of them at the beach or whatever or just picking their noses.”

Alice had tried to imagine but she was suffering from a bad cold and one nostril was stinging so badly it was making her eyes water and they had two hundred and eleven dollars in the bank and twenty minutes ago they’d just discovered the house needed a new hot water system. All she could say was “We must have been out of our minds,” and Nick’s face had changed and he’d said, desperately, “Please don’t, Alice.”

And now here was the hallway exactly as he’d described it: the sunlight, the hall table, the floorboards shining liquid gold. There was even a funny old antique hat stand in the corner covered with straw hats and baseball caps and a few draped beach towels.

Alice walked slowly down the hallway, not stopping, only touching things with a vague caressing fingertip. She looked at the framed photos: a fat baby crawling on hands and knees in the grass, gazing huge-eyed up at the camera; a fair-haired toddler laughing uncontrollably next to a little girl in a Spider-Man suit with her hands on her hips; a skinny brown boy in baggy wet board shorts, caught ecstatically midair, bright-blue sky behind him, arms and legs flailing in every direction, droplets of water on the camera lens as he crashed down into unseen water. Every photo was another memory Alice didn’t have.

The hallway led out to what had been the tiny living room where the old lady had given them tea and biscuits. Their plan had been to knock down three walls in this back area—it was Alice’s idea; she’d drawn it up on the back of a Domino’s Pizza napkin—so that it would create a huge open space where you could be cooking in the kitchen and see right out to the jacaranda tree in the back corner of the yard. “You’re not the only visionary around here,” she’d told Nick. And now here it was, almost exactly as she’d drawn it, but even better. She could see long, sleek marble countertops in the kitchen, a huge stainless-steel refrigerator, and complicated appliances.

Elisabeth walked into the kitchen—as if it were just an ordinary kitchen!—and poured the glass of orange juice down the sink.

Alice dropped her bag on the floor. There was no way this “divorce” talk could be serious. How could they be anything but blissfully happy living in this house?

“I can’t believe it,” she said to Elisabeth. “Oh look! I knew white shutters would be perfect on that back window. Nick wanted timber. Although, I see he won on the tiles. No, but I have to admit he was right. Oh, and we found a solution to the weird corner! Yes! Perfect! Oh, I don’t know about those curtains.”

“Alice,” said Elisabeth. “Have you actually got any of your memory back?”

“Oh my God! Is that a pool out there? A swimming pool? An in-ground swimming pool? Are we rich, Libby? Is that what happened? Did we win the lottery?”

“What did you tell them at the hospital?”