“Just some days?” Mika asked, eyebrows raised.

He almost smiled. “Lots of days.”

“Me too,” she said simply. She knelt on the floor to give Circe a bit of attention, her pale bronze hands vanishing into the depths of the dog’s soft golden fur, and tipped her head up to look at him. “Is it a general sense of weariness or did something specific happen?”

He chose his words carefully. “Lucie emailed Edward to try to push his visit back a few weeks, to give us more time. She’s the only one of us he doesn’t detest, so she hoped he might agree if she asked.”

“But he didn’t,” she guessed.

“He did not.”

This is not something that can wait indefinitely, Edward’s email had said, according to the screenshot Ian had sent Jamie. I know you agree.

Jamie could state with absolute certainty that nobody agreed.

“At the risk of flogging a dead horse, has anyone tried speaking to Lillian again?” Mika asked. “I know the odds aren’t good, but if you can convince her to come back . . .”

Jamie wanted to laugh, wholly without mirth, but he only said, “There’d be no point trying.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s obviously not my place to say it, but no matter what her reasons are for being away so often, she should be here now. She left the rest of you with a ticking bomb and the very least she could do is fix the—”

“The girls are not a ticking bomb,” Jamie interrupted sharply.

“I was talking about the solicitor, not the girls,” she said.

He exhaled. “Sorry.”

“But,” she went on, watching him carefully, “I expect it would be normal to struggle with looking after three children who are different from—”

He cut her off for the second time, his jaw clenched with anger. “They’re kids,” he snapped. “Some days, they’re the funniest, sweetest humans on the planet. Other days, I’m tempted to throw them out the window. Because they’re kids. Not because they’re different. Looking after them is difficult because, again, they’re kids.”

Jamie stopped abruptly, knocked off balance by something intensely vulnerable in her eyes. Regret replaced his anger.

“Mika,” he said quietly, “if your battalion of nannies and caregivers ever made you feel like a burden because you were different, they were wrong. Not you. You do know that, don’t you?”

“They didn’t know I was a witch,” she said, a little too quickly. “Not until they saw something they shouldn’t, and then they were gone, so they never had a chance to treat me any differently.”

“They may not have known you were a witch, but they knew you were different,” he guessed. “They must have known from the start that you weren’t like most of the other kids they’d known. And I assume they made sure you knew they knew that.”