"In any case, I thank you very much for your offers of hospitality, but my son and I should return."

And without waiting for a response, she turns around and starts walking away, without looking over her shoulder, trying to exude a confidence she's not feeling.

Laura stands up, takes his hand again, and leads him back through the gate. Once through, she starts telling him stories about the faerie that she's read, and what it the fairies' words seem to imply. When they reach the playground, she doesn't share this with Tobias, yet, and invents some story to cover for this Brian.

And she spends the evening and well into the night reading the book Sadde brought, confirming a few suspicions and fears and assuaging some others. Not many.

She returns there with a book on basic astronomy—no reason to go all out with anything very complex yet—and dodges various requests for her name and offerings of food. She brings her own, and throws out berries planted in her bag. A couple of fairies try following her to the gate after she has her book on sorcery, but she scares them with some vague but plausible-sounding threat about her safeguards on the mortal world. She and Sadde read the book, and don't practice any sorcery yet. They have a few things to do.

The next time she goes to fairyland, she has a water gun, a few syringes, and a spray bottle all loaded with fruit juice. She and Sadde spend the afternoon working on magic. Sadde gets distracted early, but they're four, it's understandable. There are admittedly not very many results at first.

This becomes a habit. The first thing Laura wants to learn to do is transmutation, because material scarcity is still a good source of wealth in the real world. Transmuting gold or precious stones and using them to leverage a profit seems like a reasonable starting point, even if it's somewhat far into the future.

Tobias' frustration with Sadde's genderfluidity mounts over time, and it soon becomes obvious that that won't be going away. Tobias becomes physically abusive of Sadde, at which point Laura gives up and divorces him. She's not entirely sure why she even married him, at this point—she feels like it's cliché to say "he's not the man I married," because she's pretty sure he still is, but she didn't know the man she married well enough to predict his reaction to having a queer kid.

She didn't know herself enough to predict her reaction to having a queer kid. It's unconditional love and support, it's learning and understanding. She cannot imagine ever abandoning her child, she cannot imagine not loving them completely, she cannot imagine her life without them, and they become as close to each other as possible, with implicit trust and complete openness about everything. Even as Tobias, well-positioned within their community, poisons their social well, they have each other, and Knutsford may be small but it's not that small.

Besides, they can't move anywhere, with the gate right there. Not until they learn how to create new gates.

They continue studying magic.

And eventually, after several years, Laura learns how to gate. She does it only a few weeks before Sadde does, but when that happens they move to London and create a gate to there, from somewhere else, more secluded and hidden. The next thing to learn is wards. That will take much longer, but what they've learnt of sorcery seems to imply that immortality is nowhere near impossible. This is just fine for both of them.

Laura still doesn't let Sadde go to the library or meet other fairies. She tells them everything she sees, and about what the fairies do and her interactions with them, and Sadde complains about not being let near them but agrees that minimising their exposure is a good idea. Sadde sees themself as an ace in Laura's sleeve, so to speak, and that's just fine by them. These visits are rare, anyway—they don't need to go until they've thoroughly exhausted whatever book they're using, and while by then they can use sorcery to effectively subsist without work, they decide not to spend literally all their free time in fairyland, even after Sadde argues their mother into letting them drop out of school.

And one day, Laura doesn't return from a trip to the library.

They have a protocol for this. There's a maximum amount of time she's supposed to wait, and that time has passed.

Her backpack has various tools she might need, and her belt does, too. She grabs the fingerless gloves with the rather ingenious device hidden in it, the dartblower, the small crossbow, and of course a couple of good old handguns.

And she goes through the gate out into the familiar field of changing flowers. Today they seem to be lillies, and it's dusk. She makes the trek to the library, which she hasn't done in years, but she has the map.

Of course.

She passes the solid lake, the rainbow rocks, the dry ice fountain, reaches the thicket, and then it's the library.

The fairies don't recognise her.

But they'll surely know about the mortal woman who comes by sometimes, and have they by any chance seen her?

Hmmm, doesn't sound familiar - would have noticed a mortal - oh, that mortal? no, she hasn't been by - (have a dewdrop, what's your name?, you look hungry) -

- yeah, I saw her, says one.

One? Who?

"Where? D'you know where she went?"

This guy with the highlighter-yellow hair.

"Yes," he says unhelpfully.

...nothing can ever be easy.

And of course her mother's been captured by someone. There's no other reason she wouldn't come back, and it's why Sadde came this prepared. "Where?"