She simply watched her grandmother take a little bottle out, put something in Mommy’s cup and no one else’s, and stand there watching until Mommy drank it all — and she reported what she saw, plainly, the way you’d report that the sky was gray.
Children are terrible at interpretation and wonderful at observation, and interpretation is precisely the faculty that had been failing me for a decade.
It took a person with no theories to state the fact.
I would spend the coming weeks learning to do what my daughter did instinctively: to look at what was actually in front of me, and to trust it, even when it was unbearable.
Chapter 2 — Ten Years
Her name was Mireille, and she had lived under our roof for ten years, and I want you to understand, before anything else, that I had loved her.