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October 12 - October 18, 2025
“This is either going to be the miracle you hoped for or it’s going to be an absolute fucking disaster.”
“We’ve talked about this,” said Jamie mildly. “Murder can’t be your first choice every time you don’t like something.”
Her eyes very round, seven-year-old Altamira said, with perfect gravity, “That was some excellent Mary Poppins shit right there.”
Mika had had to firmly quash Ian’s and Lucie’s hope that she would be able to teach How to Be a Woman of Colour as well as Witch 101. The latter had taken her by surprise, and she’d had to point out the obvious: that just because she was a witch and just because she had brown skin, it did not mean she had answers to all the questions the girls would inevitably have about their own identities.
Like Mika, the girls had an intersection of identities that put them smack dab in the middle of a small minority in Britain. They were witches, they weren’t white, and they’d been born far away. Much as they might all wish otherwise, there would always be people who would question whether they were British enough, normal enough, anything enough. And the one place they might have all found something close to acceptance and kinship, in a community of diverse witches, was a place that didn’t exist outside of a measly couple of hours every third month.
If I get close to people, I’ll want to tell them the truth. And if I tell them the truth, I’ll probably lose them.” “You don’t know that,” Rosetta objected. “You’re awesome. I refuse to believe anyone who knew you would turn on you.” Mika’s heart became a puddle of goo. “You’re too pure for this world, Rosetta.”
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.
“I don’t pretend to know much about people,” she offered, fixing her eyes on the road ahead, “but one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that some people are nice and some people are kind.
Niceness is all about what we do when other people are looking. Kindness, on the other hand, runs deep. Kindness is what happens when no one’s looking.”
So began another pattern in Mika’s strange new life. After that second night, there was another, and then another, and so on. Jamie would bring the whisky, and Mika would set him to work helping her with whatever spell or potion she happened to be in the middle of, and they would sometimes say actual words to each other.
“I could have another hundred years with Ken and still want more,” Ian said simply.
Jamie found his chest was too tight to allow a reply. The idea of a world without Ian and Ken was not one he allowed himself to think about. As far as he was concerned, Death had taken enough from him and every person here was going to live fucking forever.
“Mika has been so deeply hurt that she has taught herself to run before she can lay down roots, but the thing you have to remember, Jamie, is that when someone leaves, all you can do is leave a window open for them so that one day, if they choose, they can come back.”
A lot of nice people stop being nice when they don’t get exactly what they want.”
“When I’m around people like that, I feel like curling up into a little ball, like a hedgehog.
“It feels like the least I can do for the boy who was afraid of what was under his bed. I’m hoping that when I see the monsters today, they’ll just be cobwebs.”
You deserve more than what you’re allowing yourself to have.”
“I don’t think there’s been a single moment since the day you told me we’re all made up of stardust that I haven’t wanted you.”
“It’s not always enough to go looking for the place we belong,” Jamie said, his eyes on the house ahead. “Sometimes we need to make that place.”
who was to say they wouldn’t decide, like everyone else she’d tried to love before, that she was simply not worthy of being loved in return?
These were thoughts that crept in when it was dark, and the sea was too quiet, and she got trapped on the hamster wheel of her own mind.
The sight of him on her doorstep, this doorstep, did something funny to her. Her breath caught, and for the space of a heartbeat, she forgot that she was angry, she forgot that she’d been lied to, she forgot that she was in pain. She wanted to throw her arms around his neck and sob. She wanted to lose herself entirely in his lean, solid warmth and rough, sandpapery voice and his stupid, irresistible pine-needle-ness. She wanted to look into his anguished, stormy grey eyes and see something true.
“It means we know we fucked up. We know why you might leave for good. But we wanted you to know that we want you to stay. Not just for now. Always.
God, he’d only been here ten minutes and she was already about to fall apart.
It’s a leap of faith to love people and let yourself be loved. It’s closing your eyes, stepping off a ledge into nothing, and trusting that you’ll fly rather than fall.
Danger rarely wore a monstrous face and a wielded a pitchfork. No, danger came most often in the form of people like Edward, the nice people whose niceness only went so deep, who saved their niceness for people exactly like them, who believed they were more deserving of power and respect than anyone who was a little bit different.
And to you, dear reader. Thank you for following Mika to the very end.
