Steph’s eyes snapped open. She hadn’t even realized she’d screwed them shut. Becca’s head lolled against the wall, her face slack and gray. Steph eased her grip and the knife clattered to the floor. Her mind wouldn’t clear enough to be sure of what she’d done.

Becca twitched beneath her hands. And as Steph looked again at her face, she realized she hadn’t smothered or strangled Becca. Her cousin was having a seizure. As far as Steph knew, it was her first in over twenty years. She’d shunned her medication while in prison, but had remained seizure-free. Apparently that could happen: Epilepsy could absent itself without any obvious explanation. Becca had told Steph, during one of her more candid moments last year, that it was almost as if she’d dreamed her condition: It’s like I dreamed it all. Mum, Dad, hairdressing, epilepsy . . . life.

Becca wasn’t convulsing like she’d done during seizures in the past. Her eyes were rolling, though, that left arm still raised as if stuck. Steph lowered her to the floor. The seizure gathered momentum and Steph was back in her old kitchen, or perhaps in Auntie Rach’s garden, anxious to help her cousin. Old habits took over: She slipped her hand beneath Becca’s head and, for a confused time-slip of a moment, she flooded with tenderness.

It was as if things were on pause for the length of Becca’s seizure, and then reality would be back, choices would have to be made, truths confronted. In her mind’s eye, Steph saw the wingspan of a plane with a rippling backdrop of stars. She felt a breeze on her face, a swooping sensation inside.

The room suffused with bleached light. It skated across the carpet, turned the walls into bright blank screens. Everything was awash with it: the secondhand furniture that Steph had bought for Becca; the sofa where they’d had so many strained conversations, but also where they’d laughed and reminisced, even in recent times.

She became aware of her name being shouted. Then somebody else was in the room, running toward her. The white light had gone, and Steph realized it must have been headlights from the street below.

Turning to her left, she saw Paul.

Paul is here. Kneeling beside her, staring at Becca stretched out on the floor with her eyes closed. Steph had never thought her husband and cousin would be in the same room. She’d spent the last four years doing everything she could to keep them apart.

“Steph, are you . . . ? What is this place? Who’s this woman?”

His questions flowed over her.

“You’ve got blood on you. Is it yours? Is it hers? Is Freya here?”