The memory I have of Sandra is as strong as some of the memories I have of my characters. Sometimes the only proof I have she ever existed is the wedding ring on my finger and the photograph I have of her and Eva in my room. Sometimes I get confused between shooting her and having one of my bad guys shooting one of my good guys. I don’t remember it, but I have enough imaginative tools to be able to picture the scene. I do remember the blood, and holding her hand. I remember calling the police and asking them to come and help. I remember them arriving and a while later taking her away and me away—Sandra to the morgue, me to the police station. I know there were a number of days between my wife dying and me calling for help, days in which I wanted Eva to have some semblance of a honeymoon, but I don’t know how many. Two or three. Maybe four. I don’t think there was a trial, but I don’t know for sure. I think between the defense and the prosecution a deal was made. I was sick, nobody doubted that, sick and better off in a care facility than a prison.

As the Alzheimer’s continues to evolve, I will remember less and less of what happened. This illness is like having a hard drive full of photographs and videos and contacts being deleted. By the end of the year the ratio might be one good day to ten off days. With that in mind, let me get down what I remember and tell you who you were and what’s been happening.

Let’s start with the nursing home. It’s a good distance out of the city, making me feel like me and my fellow patients are all in the out of sight out of mind category. It’s a pretty big place, two stories and maybe thirty rooms or so, the staff all warm and caring and always wanting the best for everybody here. The grounds are pretty big too, lots of flowers and trees and some of the patients hang about outside pulling weeds or sitting in the sun, while others remain in one of the common areas, watching TV or reading books or chatting. There are a couple of people in cots, aware of nothing, just banging their heads all day long while they soil themselves. Some of us can feed ourselves, and in that small act we can at least take some enjoyment from our food, but others have to be fed, the nurses with barely enough time to feed one patient before moving on to the next, mealtime a chore, and it’s heartbreaking. Absolutely heartbreaking, and whatever the staff are being paid here it isn’t enough.

I often think about escaping, about finding my way back to Eva and begging her to forgive me—two things I think are impossible. However, I have been stopped on the edge of the grounds a few times, getting ready to wander into the woods. I think that if I could make it back home to where I used to live I would do better there. Surely there I would be able to keep more of myself intact, rather than in this unfamiliar place where my memory is being split into smaller pieces every day, fragments being cast into the great beyond. Surely I could use my crime-writing money to buy my house back and for home care. But the courts . . . the law . . . they won’t allow it. That’s the man telling me what I can’t do. The man frowning on me because I shot Sandra. How much money does the man pump into war, and tourism, and sport, compared to Alzheimer’s research?

As far as first entries go, I think that covers it. There’s more to explain. If I can remember any of it, I’ll carry on later. I’m not sure how to finish a diary entry. My instinct is to finish it on a cliff-hanger, and I guess that’s the crime writer in me. Oh, by the way, there is a crime writer living inside me—his name is Henry Cutter. On a good day, Henry is nothing more than a pen name, but on a bad day I sometimes wonder if he’s the one who takes over. If so, then it must have been Henry that killed Sandra, because I have no memory of it.

Cliff-hanger time. I’m not so sure Sandra is the only person Henry has killed.

It’s a journal, not a diary Jerry thinks, as he puts the journal down after reading the first entry. He can remember it now—not what he wrote, but the act of writing. He can picture himself sitting in his room in the chair by the window and filling the pages. He can even remember the first entry, can remember Eric giving him the journal to write in, Eric’s advice about putting in plot ideas to keep his mind active. Of course it was all a lie. Eric was an ideas thief. A stealer of words. There never would be a pill to cure Alzheimer’s—not in Jerry’s lifetime.

He’s sitting in Eric’s chair behind Eric’s desk with Eric’s wife asleep a few rooms away. He and Hans picked her up to make her more comfortable. He’s getting used to hauling unconscious people around. Hans suggested laying her down in one of the bedrooms, but in the end they settled for a couch in the lounge, as Jerry didn’t want her waking and getting any ideas—such as the fact they killed her husband. She will be asleep for at least a few hours, Hans has assured him. Then she’ll wake up and her journey as a widow will begin, from pain and sorrow to disgust after she learns the kind of man her husband really was. A word thief. A killer. This woman would shoot Jerry now if given the chance, but within the week she will be thanking him.

Reading the first entry of this journal sparks his awareness of the original. He can remember sitting at his desk scribbling on the pages while Sandra’s body lay on the floor. It’s possible he wrote something that would help him understand all of this, which just confirms his theory that he needs to get hold of it, but it also suggests something else. It’s possible he wrote about that night in this second journal. The first entry he just read is almost identical to the one Eric pasted into his manuscript. He flicks to the end of the fledgling writer’s document, hoping there will be some answers, but there is no end. Eric must have been still working on it. Jerry remembers hitting that brick wall himself over the years, getting ninety percent of the way through and not knowing how to wrap things up, then realizing it was necessary to change that ninety percent in ninety different ways.

He rolls the chair over to the computer. Stuck to the monitor is a Post-it note, the words Write what you know and fake the rest have been written on it. He finds the novel on the desktop, along with five others. He double-clicks Crime Writer Working Title and then starts scrolling through it. Right away he can see it’s longer. In this version Gerald Black, the crime writer in question, has found a way to sneak in and out of the nursing home so he can carry on his killing spree. Gerald sneaks into the back of a laundry truck, as if he’s escaping a prison from a 1960s movie. Jerry wonders if that’s how he’s been sneaking out, but can’t recall any laundry trucks.

Gerald, it seems, is replicating the crimes from within his books, but nobody suspects him. The police believe an obsessed fan is responsible. Eddie, the orderly hero, believes Gerald may be responsible, and that Gerald has been faking his illness all along. To what end, Jerry can’t fathom. Living in a nursing home isn’t living the dream, and if you’re that good at faking an illness, then you may as well fake your innocence and find another way to not get caught. It’s something Eddie hasn’t been able to figure out either—or at least explain. Jerry’s diary entries are forced into the narrative, but they don’t quite work, because the entries are from a man who is genuinely losing his mind, not from a man making it all up. Seeing his words in these pages makes him feel even more violated and continues to blunt the edges of guilt he might have felt for dropping the orderly to his death.