There is a particular kind of pause that happens when a child is deep in a picture book. Not the pause before a turned page. The other one — the longer one, where the book goes still and the child doesn't. Something is happening. You can see it in the way their eyes move across the illustration, in the small stillness of their body. They are not just looking. They are reading. Long before a child can decode a sentence, they are learning to read faces — the angle of a characte