It had struck Mika, packing her clothes in the attic, that no matter what she did, she always found herself right back in her childhood, so she might as well use the house it came with. She was thirty-one, but here she was again, just as she’d been as a child, trapped on the hamster wheel of her mind, conducting a postmortem on every memory to find out what, if anything, had been real. She had always understood, at the end of the previous postmortems, that the answer was nothing. Nothing had been real. Her caretakers had been paid to look after her, and some had been kind and some merely nice and she had not mattered to any of them. Some had left without hurting her and some had left after Mika had been shunned, used, or lied to. And always, in the end, she had been forgotten.

Over the years, Mika had embraced all the things that made her different and had discovered that she liked herself very much. But what was that worth without human connection? How was it possible to live, truly live, without the companionship of other people, without a family formed in any of the thousands of ways families could be formed?

It was a bit like that old philosophical question about a tree falling in the woods, wasn’t it? If no one remembered her, and she didn’t matter to anyone, did she really exist?

She had been a ghost until Nowhere House, leaving no trace of herself on anybody, but she had thought for a few precious weeks that maybe she had at last come alive. Maybe, like Pinocchio or the Velveteen Rabbit, she had at last been made real.

And now she didn’t know. She didn’t know what had been real. Had those late nights in the attic with Jamie been part of the bigger scheme to save his family? Had every kindness from Ian, Ken, and Lucie been underpinned by probing questions to determine how useful she could be?

So went the hamster wheel, round and round, until she brought the Broomstick to a stop in a tiny driveway in front of the familiar white door of a townhouse.

Circe poked her head between the two front seats and gave the house a long, unimpressed look.

“I know,” Mika agreed. “But it’s all we’ve got.”