I sat across from her sipping my coffee, she staring into hers.

"I can't believe they're gone." She whispered.

I didn't respond, letting her talk at her own pace.

"My parents were on the train when it crashed, as well as the Professor, Mrs. Plummer, my cousin, his friend, my siblings…."

I noted that the mention of her siblings caused a tear to fall. "You were close to them?"

She sniffed, wiped away the tear with a handkerchief and nodded. "I used to be, but…not so much now."

My curiosity got the better of me. "Why not?"

"I- I was jealous."

Jealous? My eyebrows went up. "Forgive me, Miss Pevensie, but you don't seem like the jealous type."

A weak smile flitted across her lips, but she didn't look up. "It didn't seem fair; I didn't understand. We couldn't ever go back, but they still had faith somehow."

Couldn't go back?

"They thought I had forgotten, but it was just too painful for me to think about; losing so much like that…I don't know how the others did it…."

I found my voice. "Couldn't go back where?"

She looked up at me for the first time since she'd gotten her coffee. "Narnia."

Narnia. Something about the word resonated within me, bringing back fond memories of a young boy, sitting in a dark wardrobe, telling stories about chivalrous knights and their adventures. Narnia. There was a magic to the word that called to me.

Tentatively, I asked, "Would it help if you talked about it?"

"Well," She seemed to be mulling it over, frowning into her coffee. "It might." She made up her mind, glancing up. "Mind you, I'm not much of a story teller, so let me know if I confuse you.

"It started during the war. Finchley was being bombed, so Peter, Edmund, Lucy and I were sent to stay with Professor Kirke in the countryside…."

I sat at home, staring into the fire, musing over the story Susan Pevensie had told me. On the surface, it was ludicrous: four children stumbling into another world ruled by a cruel Witch who made it only winter and never Christmas and turned people to stone, a country mostly populated by Talking Animals, Dwarves, and Creatures from Greek mythology, the children discovering they were prophesied kings and queens, receiving gifts from Father Christmas, defeating the Witch, and ruling many long (mostly) peaceful years before stumbling back into this world. It was a game four wartime evacuees might make up to escape a harsh reality.

But there was her brother's betrayal and redemption; why would they make that up? And the close relationship she'd shared with her siblings; you couldn't fake that. And there had been sevenpeople who had apparently agreed with her, including two well-respected adults.

And then there was Aslan. His power over a country held spell-bound by a powerful evil enchantress, His willing (and eerily familiar) sacrifice for a self-admitted traitor, His power over life and death, His sheer authority….

No, Aslan was not someone you could come up with on your own.

He simply was.

Perhaps, I mused, I would ask Miss Pevensie for another story from the "Chronicle", as she called it. The Chronicles of Narnia. Yes, I liked that.