This extract is taken from the novel The Remaining Hours by Anna Kowalski.

The Remaining Hours (extract)

My mother spoke in the third person when she was frightened.

"Your mother is fine," she said, the morning after she had not come home. She stood at the kitchen counter with her back to me, filling the kettle in the particular way she did when she was performing
normality, holding it slightly away from the tap so the water made a louder
5 sound. "Your mother just needed some air."

I was eleven. I understood, even then, that this was not true.

She turned, and her face had the careful arrangement of a person who had decided in advance what expression to wear. She had made the decision, I would later understand, before she crossed the threshold;
possibly before she got on the bus; possibly while she was still
10 at Mrs Almeida's, putting on her coat, checking the arrangement in the mirror above the sideboard. She had decided who she would be when she came home, and she was being it.

"We'll have toast," she said. Not: Would you like toast? Not: I'm sorry. We'll have toast, as if feeding me were continuity, as if the production of toast were a kind of answer.

I got the bread. She buttered it with the same deliberate calm she brought to everything
15 that needed not to be a crisis, and I ate, because this was also what you did: you accepted the toast, and you did not ask what your mother meant when she said your mother, and you understood that
there were rooms in her that had no doors.

How and to what effect is narrative voice used in this text?