In the end, it had not been Mika’s reasoned arguments, impassioned pleas, or shameless sexual favours that had swayed him. “I’ll agree to this,” Jamie had said, his eyes twinkling wickedly, “if you stop making excuses and just open your magical tea and potion shop.”

So Mika had (heroically, she felt) overcome her terror of catastrophic failure. She and Ian had converted the barn into a beautiful, whimsical, olde-worldy kind of potion shop, and she had created a website full of artsy pictures of tea leaves and herbs, and Primrose had immediately sent all the witches in the Society the link and address.

Mika had sold all of her first batch in less than a week.

Which meant Jamie had to agree to them hosting the next meeting of the Very Secret Society of Witches, a meeting that, after much arguing with Primrose, would be quite unprecedented.

Because everyone was invited. Every witch in the Society was welcome, of course, but so was every person who had raised them, grown up with them, or loved them (as long as they were still trusted, and wanted to, of course). Primrose resisted and protested and had an infinite number of very sensible reasons to reject this idea out of hand, but even she was unable to withstand the force of Mika in the full, passionate throes of determination.

So on that spring morning, with a fat, golden sun in the sky, the sea holly in bloom on the dunes, the ocean an endless blue, and bluebells growing wild in the woods, the front garden of Nowhere House had been transformed into something that Ian said was perilously like a party.

All the witches had come, of course, and a fair few had accepted Mika’s invitation to bring others. Belinda Nkala brought her older brother, a slightly bewildered and bashful Black man in his forties, who came with a lemon cheesecake he’d made himself and which made him an instant favourite; Hilda had brought the two loving Korean aunts who had raised her, her five boisterous cousins, an ill-tempered cat, and her fiancée Kira (“Who is now my wife, not my fiancée, and she knows everything!”); and Agatha Jones, to everyone’s shock, brought a boyfriend who was somehow even more ancient than she was.

It felt like something out of a dream to Mika, standing at the edge of the garden and watching this strange (one might even use the word irregular) assortment of people drinking tea, eating cheesecake, and showing off their spells and spellbooks with pride.