Mom was quiet until we were all seated around the kitchen table. Dad and I had cleaned up the mess while Síle helped Mom. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at that point that Síle and Mom spoke Clair, better than I could.

"You okay, Adelle?" I heard Dad asking.

I busied myself making her favourite tea - Assam with just this amount of milk, just that amount of sugar. Loose leaves held in a tea infuser, water from a real, legit 240V kettle she refused to give up. I could see the appeal, with how fast the water boiled compared to the Canadian ones.

I made enough for all four of us. I guess, in the end, I was my mother's child; the ritual of making tea was something that engrossed me and quieted my thoughts, too.

For Síle, it would be her first taste of Earth food or drink. That should have excited me more, but I was worried about Mom.

"When I was a little girl, back in England," she said eventually, "we were to stay on the estate. But I was a free spirit; and one day, I was adventuring into the suburbs of Oxford with a school friend, Lucy. We found a small brick... box. I had no other name for it: a series of five brick walls, around an area the size of a modest house, with ivy growing all over them, and no door that we could see.

"Well, of course that wouldn't do. Lucy was climbing up the vines faster than I could wonder if this was a good idea. Maybe it blocked off something dangerous. But I followed her. As it turns out, I was right."

She stopped to warm her hands on the mug and sip.

Síle was staring at Mom as if in rapt attention, but she wouldn't have understood a word of it. Surprisingly, Mom stopped her story to give Síle the short version before continuing on. To my ears, her Clair sounded slightly strange, but Síle apparently had no trouble with it.

"What we found inside would become the hiding place of Lucy and myself for quite some time. The walls inside were also covered in ivy. But beyond that, a wondrous garden. There was no sign of any caretaker, and we never saw one; but there were flower beds, trees, a little fountain fed by nothing we could see. We got in the habit of bringing supplies and trimming and cleaning, ourselves.

"Eventually we found something even better than a secret garden: a secret world."

She paused again, sipping quietly.

"Shanaclair?" I asked.

She laughed briefly, quietly.

"No," she went on. "They didn't call it that back then. In the garden, we uncovered a stone arch carved with rose vines and roses. The two of us ran through and found, to our great surprise and delight, that we were no longer in the secret garden but in a massive forest.

"It was old growth, massive trees reaching up to the sky, and mostly empty space in between them, their branches casting a sort of eternal twilight. And there was the arch, just standing in the middle of it all with no path or anything.

"We weren't completely daft, so we walked back through and came back the next day with some basic survey tools, so we wouldn't get lost."

That's way more sensible than me, I thought.

"It came out near a town, Saillvert," she said. "We spent many days there, learning Clair and making friends. Some of them even came back to see Earth with us. But the peace wouldn't last."

Her eyes went hard while she took another sip. She paused to translate for Síle again.

"We became quite enamoured with the place," she went on, "and we even started to talk about staying there, about becoming citizens of Saillvert and abandoning Earth. Who doesn't want to stay in the land in the wardrobe? At least, that's how we thought of it. The hidden land of magic and adventure. Sadly, that was all the permission Danna needed to take what she felt was hers."

Mom sat sipping at her tea, staring into a distance only she could see, for so long that I started wondering if that was the end of her story.

Eventually, she caught up Síle again, and then continued in English.

"It started with the dreams.

"Of course, I dreamt of the place - we spent so much time there, who wouldn't dream about it? But Lucy... it whispered to her. Danna whispered to her. She always wanted to go. She didn't want to return.

"Lucy started staying overnight on a regular basis. She grew into someone I hardly recognized, getting older and older than me as I didn't always stay with her. Once, I visited, and I started seeing the markings on her, like you, Alyx... Danna's Touch. She lost her interest in little Adelle, then."

Dots started connecting in my head.

"Were you... were you and her..."

A bittersweet smile passed across her face. "Sappho and her friend? Maybe we were. But a grown woman, a priestess obsessed with her goddess, didn't really have room in her life for me. She went to live in Ard Shanaclair, married, worked in the government."

Mom finished her story to Síle, who covered her mouth in sadness toward the end of it.

I could tell that she'd been holding it in, stiff upper lip and all that nonsense, but the tears had started sliding quietly down her face.

"When she vanished without a trace, the police came 'round. I didn't tell them about the garden or the arch, or the other world, of course. There was no proof, but doubt fell on my family. I had to be perfect. I went nowhere near the garden for years."

Mom sighed deeply.

"When I finally got back over to the garden, I had trouble getting inside, since I couldn't just climb the vines. Once I got inside, I walked to Saillvert. Lucy and I had worn our own path over time, and it was still there, somehow.

"I hardly recognized the quaint village of just a few years ago. It was a full-sized town, and though I could recognize the bones of the village, the change was astonishing."

That time, when Mom repeated her words to Síle, there was a response.

"I know Saillvert," Síle said. "It's near the ocean. Far away, days of travel by An Lien."

"An Lien?" Mom asked.

"A kind of bullet train system," I said to her in English. She raised her eyebrows and just shook her head slowly.

"It's a huge city now," Síle continued. "Bigger than Ard Shanaclair."

"Anyway," Mom went on in English. "I found one of my friends eventually. He had been in his mid teens, maybe. This man was in his fifties and had grandchildren. He told me about Lucy. She had become Fí-Réalta Lusí Shanaclair an Tánaiste de Rose.

"I didn't have the heart or the means to seek her out; why would it matter? What could we possibly have in common anymore? So I came back to Earth and moved on with life. Life here. I'm done with that place. Or so I thought."

She laughed a bitter laugh.

"I moved far away," she continued, "began a life in a new country, all to get away from that arch. And here I am, moved right next to one. My child already in the grip of Danna, and a girl from the place at my table."

Mom stared somewhere far in the distance, saying angrily in Clair, "Haven't you taken enough from me?"