At half past five, in the dark, I stood behind the kitchen door and watched her through the crack of the hinge.
Mireille turned on the light.
She made my tea, the same as every morning, with the ease of long habit.
And then she opened the jar she had blocked me from the night before, and she did to my morning cup the thing my eight-year-old daughter had described — the small, practiced, deliberate act of a person who had done this many hundreds of times, unhurried, careful, watching the door the whole while.
I am not going to describe what she did or how, because the how of it does not belong in this account and never will; what matters is only that I stood in the dark and watched my mother-in-law deliberately tamper with the tea she was about to smile at me and call good for my stomach, and that the sight of it took the floor out from under me completely.
I did not confront her.