Mika lowered the pale thing to the grass at her feet and immediately drew her hands back to tuck them in the warmth under her arms. The glow of gold dust and fireflies hovered around her, making it impossible for her not to see the pale thing for what it was.

It was a skeleton, white and pristine, wrapped in the remains of a soft, striped wool blanket that Mika was almost certain Ian had knitted. A skull, a spine, a femur, toes. Bones. There was no stink of decay and no suggestion of rot, just the damp, earthy scent of soil and rain.

It was almost funny. She, with all her irregular ideas, had never once suspected this. Honestly, all this needed now was an old locket, and it would be the perfect Gothic tale of—

Ah. There it was.

Around the neck of the skeleton was a tarnished silver locket with an engraved letter L.

She’d had to see it for herself. It wasn’t that she hadn’t believed Jamie when he’d told her, exactly, but some things you just have to see with your own eyes. And he’d been telling her the truth, for once: here in front of her, retrieved from where she’d been buried and hidden beneath the impossibly perfect sunflowers, was all that was left of Lillian Nowhere.

Mika had been here for weeks, and there’d been a corpse beneath the sunflowers the whole time.

“Where’s the rest of her?” Jamie sounded hoarse and haunted, his voice right behind her. He’d followed her up from the shore, quiet, waiting. “She shouldn’t be just bones so quickly.”

“She’s a witch,” Mika said numbly. “The earth took her, and gave you the sunflowers in return.”

And, just like that, the dread and anguish found her.

She spun on her heel to face him. “When did she die?”

“June,” Jamie rasped. “It was the night before she was supposed to leave for South America. She was walking across the kitchen to get a cup of tea and she just dropped. She was gone before she hit the floor. It must have been a heart attack, or maybe an aneurysm.”

“So Lillian’s been dead the whole time I’ve known you,” Mika said, keeping her rage and anguish contained in as low and tight a voice as she could muster. “Do the girls know?”

“No. Just the four of us, and now you.”

“Why?”