Primrose, who subscribed to the belief that if you weren’t five minutes early, you were late, was already at a frilly, dainty corner table when Mika entered the café. Pinning her sunniest smile to her face, Mika joined her. With the exception of an impeccably polite greeting, Primrose said nothing more until they’d ordered a pot of Earl Grey—and Mika had ordered an entire plate of scones with jam and clotted cream—before throwing down the gauntlet.

“So it was you,” Primrose said, looking rather satisfied. “I suspected as much.”

“What was me?” Mika asked innocently.

“The surge,” said Primrose, raising her eyebrows. “On Sunday morning. I didn’t feel it myself, but Agatha says there was a distinct disruption from somewhere north of Essex. You came to mind at once.”

“Of course I did.”

“Don’t give me that look, Mika. Your recklessness this past year has not gone unnoticed. That said,” Primrose went on, cocking her head to one side, “I noticed your social media accounts have been deactivated, dear. Dare I assume I have finally had some influence over you?”

Mika crammed her mouth full of an excessively jammy, creamy scone to make herself feel better about the indignity of having to allow Primrose to believe she was the reason Mika had stopped posting witchy videos online. And a happy bonus: the ludicrous quantity of sugar made her feel just a teeny bit less like a tired, delicate flower about to crumple beneath a stiff breeze.

“I was puzzled by the surge,” Primrose went on, sipping her tea in the daintiest of fashions, “because you’ve been living in Brighton these past few months, haven’t you? Or do you live somewhere else now? Frankly,” she tutted, “it seems to me absurd that you keep moving around like an overenthusiastic mayfly when there’s a perfectly good house going to waste.”

This was not a new complaint, and from Primrose’s point of view, Mika knew it was a reasonable one. After all, there was an empty house on a quiet street in the city of York, and it did indeed seem like madness not to use it. But it was the house of Mika’s childhood, and she did not know how to tell Primrose that nothing could convince her to go back to the ghosts and memories that haunted it.

“In any case,” Primrose went on, impervious to the thoughts clattering around Mika’s mind, “I did wonder if perhaps you weren’t the cause of the surge after all, but now that I see you, it’s obvious you were. If you don’t mind my saying so, dear, you look positively sickly.”

“I can always count on you to bolster my self-esteem, Primrose,” said Mika in her most cheerful voice.

“Well? Are you going to explain what happened?”

“Are you going to give me a choice?”