She came to the kitchen at midnight.
I heard her on the stairs, not the back stairs, the main ones, the route of a guest with standing rather than the route of someone who had learned to move through this house without being noticed. The footsteps were even and deliberate in the way of someone who was not trying to be quiet and was not trying to be loud and had simply decided that the hour did not require either performance.
I was at the counter.
I had come down an hour earlier for the same reason I always came down in the dark hours, not because the kitchen required me but because I required the kitchen, the specific quality of a space that was mine in a way no other space in this house had ever been, the lamp above the table and the cold at the window and the particular silence of a r
