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We walk together. The cold is biting and I pull my scarf tight around my neck. I am glad I have in my bag the cell phone that Ben has given me. Glad, too, that Dr. Nash has not insisted we drive somewhere. There is some part of me that trusts this man, but another, larger part tells me he could be anyone. A stranger.

I am an adult, but a damaged one. It would be easy for this man to take me somewhere, though I don’t know what he would want to do. I am as vulnerable as a child.

We reach the main road that separates the end of the street from the park opposite, and wait to cross. The silence between us feels oppressive. I had intended to wait until we were sitting down before asking him, but find myself speaking. “What sort of doctor are you?” I am saying. “What do you do? How did you find me?”

He looks over at me. “I’m a neuropsychologist,” he says. He is smiling. I wonder if I ask him the same question every time we meet. “I specialize in patients with brain disorders, with an interest in some of the newer functional neuroimaging techniques. For a long time I’ve been particularly interested in researching memory process and function. I heard about you through the literature on the subject, and tracked you down. It wasn’t too difficult.”

A car rounds the bend farther up the road and heads toward us. “The literature?”

“Yes. There have been a couple of case studies written about you. I got in touch with the place where you were being treated before you came to live at home.”

“Why? Why did you want to find me?”

He smiles. “Because I thought I could help you. I’ve been working with patients with these sorts of problems for a little while. I believe they can be helped; however, they require more intensive input than the usual one hour per week. I had a few ideas about how real improvements could be effected and wanted to try some of them out.” He pauses. “Plus I’ve been writing a paper on your case. The definitive work, you might say.” He begins to laugh, but cuts it short when I do not join in. He clears his throat. “Your case is unusual. I believe we can discover a lot more about the way memory works than we already know.”

The car passes and we cross the road. I feel myself get anxious, uptight. Brain disorders. Researching. Tracked you down. I try to breathe, to relax, but find I cannot. There are two of me, now, in the same body; one is a forty-seven-year-old woman, calm, polite, aware of what kind of behavior is appropriate and what is not, and the other is in her twenties, and screaming. I cannot decide which is me, but the only noise I hear is that of distant traffic and the shouts of children from the park, and so I guess it must be the first.

On the other side, I stop and say, “Look, what’s going on? I woke up this morning in a place I’ve never seen but that’s apparently my home, lying next to a man I’ve never met who tells me I’ve been married to him for years. And you seem to know more about me than I know about myself.”

He nods slowly. “You have amnesia,” he says, putting his hand on my arm. “You’ve had amnesia for a long time. You can’t retain new memories, so you’ve forgotten much of what’s happened to you for your entire adult life. Every day you wake up as if you are a young woman. Some days you wake as if you are a child.”

Somehow it seems worse, coming from him. A doctor. “So it’s true?”

“I’m afraid so. Yes. The man at home is your husband. Ben. You’ve been married to him for years. Since long before your amnesia began.” I nod. “Shall we go on?”

I say yes, and we walk into the park. A path circles its edge, and there is a children’s playground nearby, next to a hut from which I see people emerge carrying trays of snacks. We head there, and I take a seat at one of the chipped Formica tables while Dr. Nash orders our drinks.

When he returns, he is carrying two plastic cups filled with strong coffee, mine black, his white. He adds sugar from the bowl on the table but offers none to me, and it is that, more than anything, that convinces me we have met before. He looks up and asks me how I hurt my forehead.

“What—?” I say at first, but then I remember the bruise I saw this morning. My makeup has clearly not covered it. “That?” I say. “I’m not sure. It’s nothing, really. It doesn’t hurt.”

He does not answer. He stirs his coffee.

“So my husband looks after me at home?” I say.

He looks up. “Yes, though he hasn’t always. At first your condition was so severe that you required round-the-clock care. It has only been fairly recently that Ben felt he could look after you alone.”

So the way I feel at the moment is an improvement, then. I am glad I cannot remember the time when things were worse.

“He must love me very much,” I say, more to myself than to Nash.

He nods. There is a pause. We both sip our drinks. “Yes. I think he must.”

I smile and look down, at my hands holding the hot drink, at the gold wedding band, at the short nails, at my legs, crossed politely. l do not recognize my own body.

“Why doesn’t my husband know that I’m seeing you?” I say.

He sighs and closes his eyes. “I’ll be honest,” he says, clasping his hands together and leaning forward in his seat. “Initially I asked you not to tell Ben that you were seeing me.”

A jolt of fear goes through me, almost an echo. Yet he does not look untrustworthy.

“Go on,” I say. I want to believe he can help me.

“Several people—doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and so on—have approached you and Ben in the past, wanting to work with you. But he has always been extremely reluctant to let you see these professionals. He has made it very clear that you have had extensive treatment before, and in his opinion it has achieved nothing other than to upset you. Naturally he wanted to spare you—and himself—from any more upset.”

Of course; he doesn’t want to raise my hopes. “So you persuaded me to come and see you without him knowing?”

“Yes. I did approach Ben first. We spoke on the phone. I even asked him to meet with me so that I could explain what I had to offer, but he refused. So I contacted you directly.”

Another jolt of fear, as if from nowhere. “How?” I say.

He looked down at his drink. “I came to see you. I waited until you came out of the house and then introduced myself.”

“And I agreed to see you? Just like that?”

“Not at first. No. I had to persuade you that you could trust me. I suggested that we should meet once, just for one session. Without Ben’s knowledge if that was what it took. I said I would explain to you why I wanted you to come and see me, and what I thought I could offer you.”

“And I agreed . . .”

He looks up. “Yes,” he says. “I told you that after that first visit it was entirely up to you whether you chose to tell Ben or not, but if you decided not to I would call you to make sure you remembered our appointments, and so on.”

“And I chose not to.”

“Yes. That’s right. You’ve spoken about wanting to wait until we were making progress before telling him. You felt that was better.”

“And are we?”

“What?”

“Making progress?”

He swallows some more coffee, then puts his cup back on the table. “I believe so, yes. Though progress is somewhat difficult to quantify exactly. But lots of memories seem to have come back to you over the last few weeks—many of them for the first time, as far as we know. And there are certain truths that you are aware of more often, where there were few before. For example, you occasionally wake up and remember that you’re married, now. And—”

He pauses. “And?” I say.

“And, well, you’re gaining independence, I think.”

“Independence?”

“Yes. You don’t rely on Ben as much as you did. Or me.”

That’s it, I think. That is the progress he is talking about. Independence. Perhaps he means I can make it to the shops or a library without a chaperone, though right now I am not even sure that much is true. In any case, I have not yet made enough progress for me to wave it proudly in front of my husband. Not even enough for me to always wake up remembering I have one.

“But that’s it?”

“It’s important,” he says. “Don’t underestimate it, Christine.”

I don’t say anything. I take a sip of my drink and look around the café. It is almost empty. There are voices from a small kitchen at the back, the occasional rattle as the water in an urn reaches boiling point, the noise of children playing in the distance. It is difficult to believe that this place is so close to my home and yet I have no memory of ever being here before.

“You say we’ve been meeting for a few weeks,” I say to Dr. Nash. “So what have we been doing?”

“Do you remember anything of our previous sessions? Anything at all?”

“No,” I say. “Nothing. As far as I know I am meeting you for the first time today.”

“Forgive me asking,” he says. “As I said, you have flashes of memory, sometimes. It seems you know more on some days than on others.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “I have no memory of ever meeting you before, or of what happened yesterday, or the day before, or last year for that matter. Yet I can remember some things from years ago. My childhood. My mother. I remember being at university, just. I don’t understand how these old memories could have survived when everything else has been wiped clean.”

He nods throughout my question. I don’t doubt he has heard it before. Possibly I ask the same thing every week. Possibly we have exactly the same conversation.

“Memory is a complex thing,” he says. “Human beings have a short-term memory that can store facts and information for about a minute or so, but also a long-term memory. Here we can store huge quantities of information, and retain it for a seemingly indefinite length of time. We now know that these two functions seem to be controlled by different parts of the brain, with some neural connections between them. There is also a part of the brain that seems to be responsible for taking short-term, transient memories and coding them as long-term memories for recall much later.”

He speaks easily, quickly, as if he is now on solid territory. I would have been like that once, I suppose; sure of myself.

“There are two main types of amnesia,” he says. “Most commonly the affected person cannot recall past events, with more recent events being most severely affected. So if, for example, the sufferer has a motor accident, they may not remember the accident, or the days or weeks preceding it, but can remember everything up to, say, six months before the accident perfectly well.”

I nod. “And the other?”

“The other is rarer,” he says. “Sometimes there is an inability to transfer memories from short-term storage into long-term storage. People with this condition live in the moment, able to recall only the immediate past, and then only for a small amount of time.”

He stops talking, as if waiting for me to say something. It is as if we each have our lines, have rehearsed this conversation often.

“I have both?” I say. “A loss of the memories I had, plus an inability to form new ones?”

He clears his throat. “Yes, unfortunately. It’s not common, but perfectly possible. What’s unusual in your case, however, is the pattern of your amnesia. Generally you have no consistent memory of anything that happened since your early childhood, but you seem to process new memories in a way I have never come across before. If I left this room now and returned in two minutes, most people with anterograde amnesia would not remember having met me at all, certainly not today. But you seem to remember whole chunks of time—up to twenty-four hours—which you then lose. That’s not typical. To be honest, it doesn’t make any sense, considering the way we believe that memory works. It suggests you are able to transfer things from short-term to long-term storage perfectly well. I don’t understand why you can’t retain them.”

I may be leading a shattered life, but at least it is shattered into pieces large enough for me to maintain a semblance of independence. I guess that means I am lucky.

“Why?” I say. “What has caused it?”

He does not say anything. The room goes quiet. The air feels still and sticky. When he speaks, his words seem to echo off the walls. “Many things can cause an impairment of memory,” he says. “Either long-term or short-term. Disease, trauma, drug use. The exact nature of the impairment seems to differ, depending on the part of the brain that has been affected.”

“Yes,” I say. “But what has caused mine?”

He looks at me for a moment. “What has Ben told you?”

I think back to our conversation in the bedroom. An accident, he had said. A bad accident.

“He didn’t really tell me anything,” I say. “Nothing specific, anyway. He just said I’d had an accident.”

“Yes,” he says, reaching for his bag that sits under the table. “Your amnesia was caused by trauma. That’s true, at least partly.” He opens his bag and takes out a book. At first, I wonder if he is going to consult his notes, but instead he passes it across the table to me. “Look. I want you to have this,” he says. “It will explain everything. Better than I can. About what has caused your condition, especially. But other things as well.”

I take it from him. It is brown, bound in leather. I open it at random. The paper is heavy and faintly lined, with a red margin, and the pages are filled with dense handwriting. “What is it?” I say.

“It’s a journal,” he says. “One that you’ve been keeping over the past few weeks.”

I am shocked. “A journal?” I wonder why he has it.

“Yes. A record of what we’ve been doing recently. I asked you to keep it. We’ve been doing a lot of work trying to find out exactly how your memory behaves. I thought it might be helpful for you to keep a record of what we’ve been doing.”

I look at the book in front of me. “So I’ve written this?”

“Yes. I told you to write whatever you like in it. Many amnesiacs have tried a similar approach, but usually it’s not as helpful as you might think, as they have such a short window of memory. But as there are some things that you can remember for the whole day, I didn’t see why you shouldn’t jot down some notes in a book every evening. I thought it might help you to maintain a thread of memory from one day to the next. Plus I felt that memory might be like a muscle, something that can be strengthened through exercise.”

“And you’ve been reading it, as we’ve been going along?”

“No,” he says. “You’ve been writing it in private.”

“But how—?” I begin, and then say, “Ben’s been reminding me to write in it?”

He shakes his head. “I suggested that you keep it secret,” he says. “You’ve been hiding it, at home. I’ve been calling you to tell you where it is hidden.”

“Every day?”

“Yes. More or less.”

“Not Ben?”

He pauses, then says, “No. Ben hasn’t read it.”

I wonder why not, what it might contain that I do not want my husband to see. What secrets might I have? Secrets I do not even know myself.

“But you’ve read it?”

“You left it with me a few days ago,” he says. “You said you wanted me to read it. That it was time.”