“He was not,” Mika said, grinning at the ridiculously archaic turn of phrase. “I’d gotten around a bit by the time I met him. But he was my first and last actual boyfriend.”

Ian’s face gentled. “Were you in love?”

“I don’t think so,” Mika mused. “Looking back now, I don’t think it was anything so powerful as love, but I did care a lot more about him than I had about anyone else I’d been with before. And I was twenty, with stars in my eyes and a song in my heart, so I decided to tell him the truth. About me.”

Ian gasped.

“Not all of it,” Mika added. “I told him I practiced magic, but I didn’t tell him other witches existed. He, um, he asked if it was some weird cultural thing. His words, not mine.” She didn’t dare look up at them, but she heard someone’s breath hiss through his teeth. “I laughed it off because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. Then I showed him a few spells.”

“And then?” Jamie asked quietly.

The pain was unexpected, like an old, almost forgotten bruise that surprises you when it’s pressed. It wasn’t as bad as it used to be, but it was still there because she understood that it wasn’t about one ex-boyfriend. It was about so much more.

“I still don’t quite understand how it happened,” Mika said, her eyes fixed firmly on the teacup in front of her. An old sense of shame threatened to rear its head, but she knew it was a lying sort of feeling and she knew how to deal with it now. She said the words out loud: “I know now that it wasn’t my fault, but at the time, it felt like it must have been. It was like one day, I was me, and the next, I was casting spells he wanted me to. He was at an ATM getting cash out one time and he got me to enchant the machine so that it malfunctioned and gave him a few hundred quid that wasn’t his. Another time, I cast a basic warding spell over his phone so that he could take it into exams and look the answers up without anyone noticing. I did things like that for weeks. Because he wanted me to. Because I thought if I did enough, he’d love me.”

“Oh, Mika,” Ian said, upset, putting a hand over hers.