“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.”

An absent archaeologist, a housekeeper, a librarian, a gardener, a retired actor, and three unlikely witches. As backstories went, it was one of the weirdest Mika had ever heard.

Satisfied with a job well done, Mika dusted off her dress and closed the driver’s side door of the yellow hatchback with a final click.
“I . . .” This was about as much as Lucie could come up with. “Well, I . . .”
Her eyes very round, seven-year-old Altamira said, with perfect gravity, “That was some excellent Mary Poppins shit right there.”
Rosetta gasped. Lucie and Ken turned as one to Ian, who looked more than a little guilty.
And Mika, well, Mika just about died laughing.
“Thank you, Altamira,” she said, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes. “It was rather impressive, if I do say so myself. Now do you think you could show me where I’m going to be staying?”

One of the consequences of growing up in a house with no real company, not to mention Primrose’s rather narrow and archaic ideas about what constituted a well-stocked library, was the fact that Mika had read just about every classic there was. Twice. If it was written by somebody called Austen or Shelley or Brontë, Keats or Dickens or Eliot, Christie or Rossetti or Blake, she had read it. (Indeed, lest anyone accuse Primrose of not being worldly, she had also made sure names like Homer, Rumi, Dumas, Tolstoy, and Seth appeared on her shelves.)

Over the years, Mika had embraced all the things that made her different and had discovered that she liked herself very much. But what was that worth without human connection? How was it possible to live, truly live, without the companionship of other people, without a family formed in any of the thousands of ways families could be formed?