“He took the ferry from Belfast to Liverpool, then got on the first train from Liverpool going anywhere,” Ian said. “All by himself, this wee lad. He didn’t care where he was going so long as it was away from home. The first train turned out to be a train to Norwich. He got off at this end, bumped into Lillian outside the station, and she took one look at him and brought him back to the house with her.”

“Where Lucie, Ken, and Ian proceeded to take great pleasure in fussing over me,” said Jamie with a faint smile.

“He needed fussing over,” Ian insisted.

“How old are you now?” Mika asked.

“Thirty-six.”

Twenty years. Nowhere House had been his home for more than half his life. It was no wonder he was so territorial.

“We made him finish school a little way up the coast,” Ian went on, as proud as an indulgent grandparent, “and then we packed him off to Cambridge for a few years. He stayed on after he got his degree to lecture at the university, then went to Amsterdam for a year to teach there, then moved back to Nowhere House for good when Lillian turned up with Rosetta.”

“Are you quite finished narrating the entirely uninteresting documentary of my life?” Jamie asked irritably.

“For now,” Ian chirped.

Mika was desperately curious to know what had made Jamie leave his childhood home so dramatically, but she was quite certain asking him wouldn’t go down well. Instead, she said, “What about the rest of you?”

“Lucie was the housekeeper, just like we told you,” Ian said. “She didn’t always live at the house. You’ll have to ask her to tell you the whole story, but the long and short of it is, she had a violent husband. When she left him, she came to Lillian, who insisted she stay.”

Nowhere House was shifting in Mika’s mind. The new Nowhere House was messier than the first, a place made up of fractured pieces that, somehow, had come together to make something whole and wonderful.

As for Lillian herself, well, Mika had a lot of bones to pick with her, but Ian’s stories had given her a bit of a boost in Mika’s estimation.

“And you and Ken?” she asked Ian.

“Ours is an unexciting tale, I’m afraid,” said Ian. “We came to Nowhere House because Ken turns gardens into works of art.”

Mika watched him narrowly in the mirror. “And that’s all it was?” she prodded. “It didn’t have anything to do with you and the way you seem to be able to spot a witch just by looking at her?”

Their eyes met. Ian’s twinkled. He gave her a too-innocent shrug.

Mika let it go for the moment. Instead, she said, diplomatically, “It sounds like Lillian’s rescued a lot of people in trouble.”

“Lillian likes her strays,” said Rosetta.