Well, I think a lot of people misinterpret the age difference between Merope and Tom, so I'd like to clarify that here. The version in which Merope interacts with the true Tom is the 16-year-old version of him, meaning that she doesn't have such a large age gap compared to his state as Voldemort. It's confusing to explain, but I'd like to make this clear here so that no one worries about age gaps, because here I think about everything ;)