My mother was in the kitchen when we arrived.
Of course she was. My mother was always in the kitchen when significant things happened, which I was beginning to suspect was less a coincidence and more a deliberate positioning strategy — the kitchen as command centre, the kitchen as the room where she had the most control over the variables, the kitchen as the place where she could be doing something with her hands while she waited for whatever was coming.
She heard us on the stairs. By the time I opened the door she was at the counter with a wooden spoon in one hand and the expression of a woman who had been expecting this exact visit for some amount of time and had elected to receive it while making something rather than sitting still for it.
She looked at me.
She looked at Damien behi
