She was eight.
She had none of my knowledge, none of my adult reasoning, none of my ten years of context.
And that, it turns out, was exactly why she saw clearly and I did not.
I had ten years of reasons to explain the tea away; she had none.
I had a whole architecture of love and gratitude and need built up around Mireille that any troubling observation had to pass through, and the architecture bent every observation into a harmless shape before it reached me.
Elspeth had no architecture.