Ivan must be drunker than he thought he was. He could have sworn he knew his way around Vivienne's parents' house, since she wanted to introduce him last week and showed him the place, but maybe they have a... secret... upstairs... bar? where Vivienne's room is supposed to be? And most certainly was last time he checked? He's never going to find the sweater she sent him up looking for here, anyway. Why is there a secret upstairs bar in Vivienne's parents' house?
"N...o," he says. "Not personally, let's say. This place made part of my cousin Ivan's friend's house go missing the same way it made your garden go missing, and he got me to come look at it, and now here we are. But I know I can't be time-travelling from exactly your future because I never had a little sister, basketed or otherwise."
"I do all right," he says instead, hoping this strikes the right balance of reassuring without insulting.
"Yes," says Miles. "It is a silly name. Grandda is a little complicated about me. I guess you know that already, if you've been trying to convince him to see your brother."
"It's not exactly the running around," he says. "It's more like... he's very, very disappointed that I didn't turn out the way he wanted, so he doesn't want to have anything to do with me. But he'll get better about it later. He still gave my horse a silly name, though."
"Well, it was Grandda, and he was giving me a horse. I wasn't going to make a fuss about the name."
If she didn't have an Illyan, that might explain the continuing mystery of the basket...
"Sounds like just about everybody," he says. "Well, everybody I knew when I was five. I've met some more people since."