Blowing her a kiss, Hilda darted off. Mika wondered if she would tell Kira the truth. It was easy to talk about taking such a big, terrifying step, but actually doing it was something else entirely.

She hadn’t been alone more than ten minutes or so when she looked up to see Jamie coming her way. How long had he been gone? Less than an hour? She straightened up, immediately searching his face for signs of distress. Instead, he smiled at her, a slow, crooked smile that did obnoxious things to her heart.

Then she noticed that he had a stack of books under one arm, and that they were old, worn volumes covered in battered leather. She gasped. “No way! Are those—”

“Dad’s journals.”

“You got them back!”

He nodded, his eyes twinkling with an electric, giddy sort of high. He’d walked into an arena unsure if he’d be devoured by lions, only to come out unscathed. Even better: he’d come back with something precious, something that had been taken from him a long, long time ago.

“You didn’t want to stay a bit longer?” Mika asked as they started walking back to the car.

“I think all my mother and I needed was just to see each other one more time,” Jamie said, his energy damping as he thought about it. “Too much has happened for anything to go back to the way it was before Dad died, for either of us, but I think we were the loose threads in each other’s lives. The moment I saw her, it hit me that all I’d really wanted was to make sure she was okay. I’d left her in pieces, and I wanted to know that she was now whole. Or close to it. And she is. I think she wanted the same.”

Mika gave him an affectionate nudge. “I’m glad you got what you needed.”

“Were you okay? What did you do while I was inside?”

“I met a witch,” Mika announced.

Jamie gave her a surprised look. “A new one?”

“No, a witch from the Society. Hilda. I might have mentioned her before.” Mika gave him the highlights of her conversation with Hilda, and finished with, “I hope she tells Kira. She seems so unhappy, keeping something so big and important a secret from her.”

A shadow crossed Jamie’s face, damping some of that light in his eyes again, but he only said, “Holy Grail?”

Mika shrugged, sheepish. “Well, it is. To be loved and accepted exactly as we are? Isn’t that the thing we’re all searching for?”

“Maybe,” Jamie said, almost to himself, “but we don’t always know it when we’ve found it.”

They’d reached the carpark where they’d left Jamie’s car. It was almost deserted, the winter dusk creeping in early.

“You haven’t mentioned your brothers,” Mika observed. “Weren’t they there?”