No. That’s silly. Mother rescued that girl. That girl’s a stranger and Mother knows me.

‘Mirabelle.’

Mother! I whipped my head around but she wasn’t there. The kitchen was empty.

I frowned, puzzled, scanning the small shadowy space, the abandoned hallway beyond.

I took a step towards the hallway then stopped. My gaze fell on the frantically patterned paintings Mother had nailed to the kitchen-hallway door last year to ‘brighten up the place’. She called them psychedelic. Said they made her feel alive. They made my eyes sting and my brain cringe, but I didn’t dare tell her that. I looked at the floor and blinked away the manic patterns that had painted themselves into my eyelids. My headache was worsening. Stabbing pains set my temples on fire. I needed painkillers, but Mother had the key to the medicine cabinet. Said it was the safest way. She kept my vitamins in there too. I had to take a vitamin pill every day. Mother gave me one each morning. It was called a multivitamin. Mother said it would help keep me healthy. She used to be a nurse, so she knew everything there was to know about things like that. She stopped working when I was born. She said her grandfather left her a lot of money when he died so she didn’t need to work any more.

Mother would never tell me what happened to my father. I had a million questions, but I wasn’t allowed to ask any of them. Usually, if I tried to bring it up she got very angry and looked like she was going to cry. It made me think he was a horrible man and I didn’t want to think that. I wanted to think he was like Sara’s father in A Little Princess, or Baloo from The Jungle Book, even though he was a bear. Sometimes I daydreamed about him, about my daddy. In my mind, he was a tall man with light brown hair and sparkly eyes and the kindest smile …

My head was splitting in two. It crumpled up the picture of my imaginary father and stamped on it with dirty feet. I put one hand to my forehead and grimaced at the pain.

Before I could stop myself, I left the kitchen and crossed the hallway. At the bottom of the stairs, I stopped. My skull felt like a cracked egg. I had always suffered from headaches but this was the worst one yet.

‘Mother?’ I called. My voice came out small and pathetic.

I grabbed the banister, leaned against it as a wave of nausea swirled in my throat. I pulled myself up one step then another.

‘Mother?’

Another step and another. Another and another and another. My head was splitting open.