Jamie looked out across the night, his hands clenched tightly in the pockets of his coat. “For most of the time I’ve known her, Lillian was very open with us about her will. It was one of the few things she was open with us about. She let us see it. It said that when she died, Ken and Lucie would get some money, I’d inherit her house and the rest of her possessions, and the legal guardianship of the girls would go to her sister Peony.”

“Peony? This is the sister you mentioned once, the one you’ve never met?” Mika asked incredulously, something like horror and pity finding space in the middle of all the pain. “She wanted her to take them?”

Jamie nodded. “We tried to talk to her about it, but she was adamant that she wanted the girls to have an adult witch in their lives, someone who could protect them if she wasn’t around anymore.”

“Someone to cast wards,” said Mika. “Like the wards she cast, the ones that will break in the spring.”

“Except the best possible life isn’t always the one where you’re safest,” Jamie said quietly. “You, of all people, know that.”

“I do.”

“Taking the girls away from the only family they’ve ever known will do more harm than anything that might happen when the wards break. We tried to tell Lillian that, but she refused to listen.” A muscle flickered in his jaw. “The girls are ours and we’re theirs. We’re their family. We can’t lose them. But there’s absolutely nothing we can do to fight the will. I asked.”

“That’s the real reason you were at the solicitor’s office that day in the city? It wasn’t about your father’s will?”

“I wasn’t expecting you to ask me why I was there, so I just said the first thing that came to mind. I’m sorry. But yes, I was there to ask them if there was any way around Lillian’s will. There isn’t. The only way I’d get guardianship of the girls would be if Lillian’s sister refused to take them, and that’s too big a gamble.”

“So instead of reporting Lillian’s death, you buried her.”

He nodded. “Honestly, I don’t know what we hoped for long-term. That we could somehow hide Lillian’s death for a decade, until the girls were too old to need a legal guardian? It sounds ridiculous and half-baked, and it was. We panicked, and we did the only thing we could think of. We buried her. We needed to buy ourselves time to come up with a better plan.”

“And Edward?”