She slipped the cards into their folders, to be returned in January.

That night, Mme Fournier sat at her own kitchen table, the stack of translations before her. She graded the first eighteen quickly: good, very good, missing an accent, accord parfait . Then she returned to Sami and Chloé.

She wrote: La maison où j’ai appris à me taire n’était pas une maison ; c’était un royaume. A kingdom. A place of arbitrary rules, a distant and silent monarch, and subjects who learned to tread softly.

Mme Fournier had written the final sentence on the board in her careful, looping script, the one sentence not in the textbook. It was the same sentence she gave every year, to every fourth-year class, to see who was paying attention to the invisible grammar of the heart.

He chose patrie —homeland—over pays —country. Pays was a place on a map. Patrie was the land of your fathers, the land that had broken you and made you. It was the difference between a noun and a wound.