But, on the whole, there was a pattern to the everyday lives of the household and, much to Mika’s surprise, there was space for her in it. She quickly became the Person Who Made the Tea, as it was universally agreed that she made the best tea (“Of course I do,” she said, not very modestly), and she just as quickly became Ken’s favourite person to help him in the garden (“Being a witch does have its perks,” she said, a little more modestly). When she wasn’t teaching the girls or gardening with Ken, she went over to the cottage to help Ian with his dubious beekeeping ambitions, took Circe to the sea, showed Altamira how to properly feed the koi, helped Lucie fix broken odds and ends around the house, and spent an inordinate amount of time napping.

There were game nights and lazy TV afternoons and haphazard football matches in the garden and elaborate adventures involving the tree house and two planks of Ian’s beehive wood (apparently, they were supposed to be a pirate ship). There was spellcasting, potion-making, and an entire afternoon’s worth of Mika helping the girls make and decorate their very own spellbooks. Sometimes everyone went their separate ways, whether it was Rosetta to the library to use Jamie’s computer for some supervised online time in one of her favourite fandom groups, or Terracotta to the kitchen to make pumpkin pie with Ian, or Altamira to the sofa with Lucie and Lucie’s laptop for a virtual coding lesson. And sometimes the whole house came together, like the morning everyone abandoned whatever work they were supposed to be doing and they all went down to the beach because Terracotta had somehow coaxed, pleaded, and browbeaten Ken, Lucie, and Jamie into agreeing to a race with one child on each of their shoulders. Mika and Ian, both of whom were spared by virtue of having shoulders Terracotta deemed too flimsy for this purpose, watched from the dunes and cried actual tears of laughter.

A gentle rhythm, indeed. But it was more than that. It was peace, the kind Mika was beginning to see she had never known. She hadn’t understood how exhausting and heartbreaking it had been to hide such a big part of herself all these years, to reshape and contort herself into something more acceptable. She hadn’t realised just how heavy her mask had been until she’d discovered what it was to live without it.

To be at Nowhere House was to put herself in very real peril, so why, then, did she feel safer than she ever had before?

There was a meteor shower on the first night in December. Mika didn’t waste the opportunity, and she stayed up late so that she could catch the star shavings falling from the sky. These precious, luminous shards were one of her Can’t-Do-Withouts and her tiny vial was almost empty.