She would know that she heard her mother in the kitchen. Know, too, when she first met her stepmother, that she had heard her voice before. She would know this, but in time would cease to be quite so sure she knew it, the telling and retelling rendering it a dream, an act of childhood sleepwalking. She had simply made up a conversation between two women who should not, by rights, have known each other. She had stood, asleep and dreaming, at the bottom of the stairs.
