Clara did not say he was our grandfather as a strategy, or a provocation, or an argument in a dispute; she had no idea she was standing in the middle of a decade-old war.

She said it the way she would have said the sky was grey — as a plain fact about the world, obvious to her, requiring no defense.

And a plain fact, spoken by a child who does not know it is contested, carries a weight that no adult’s carefully chosen words ever can, because everyone listening understands that the child is not performing.

Felicia could dismiss me as a bitter ex-wife; that story was ready-made and the crowd already half-believed it.