What’s in Maribel’s tea that Esme can’t have?”

Ottoline stared at the cup, then at me.

And for the first time in ten years, the mask slipped all the way off her face — just for a second, but I saw what was underneath it, and it was nothing like a grandmother.

I have turned that second over more than any other, because it told me something I have never been able to un-know: that whatever Ottoline was, it was not simple.

Watch what her panic revealed.

My daughter reached for the poisoned cup, and Ottoline’s first instinct — faster than thought, faster than her decade of careful performance — was to stop her. Don’t drink from that cup. She could not bear to let Esme be harmed.