Chapter 1 — What Elsie Whispered
“Mommy,” my eight-year-old daughter said, very quietly, standing close to me in our living room in San Diego, “Grandma puts something in your tea.
When she thinks nobody’s watching.”
I was folding one of Lucien’s shirts, and I felt the fabric bunch tight in my fist as the words went in.
“Are you sure about that, sweetheart?” I asked.
I kept my voice even.
Every instinct I had was screaming, but I have learned that a child telling you a hard thing is watching your face to see whether it’s safe to keep talking, so I kept my face soft.
“Tell me what you saw.”
“She takes it out of a little bottle,” Elspeth said, calm in the way children are calm about things they don’t yet understand are terrible.
“She stirs it in.
And then she watches you until you drink all of it.
Every time.” She looked up at me.
“She doesn’t do it to anybody else.
Just your cup.”
I did not know yet what any of it meant.
I only knew, standing in my own living room with my husband’s shirt crushed in my hand, that my daughter did not lie, and that she had just described a pattern — just your cup, and she watches you finish it — that no innocent explanation fit.
I made myself smile at her, and I told her she’d done exactly the right thing telling me, and I put the shirt down, and at that exact moment my mother-in-law came around the corner from the hallway with a laundry basket in her arms.
I have thought a great deal, since, about why it was Elspeth who saw it and not me.