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“You spend so much time there, yet you hardly make a living wage,” Andrew said. “What would you do if you had to pay rent? Bills?”

“It isn’t even about money,” Iffat said. “Don’t you want to do something with your life?”

She didn’t ask it with malice, and her gentle tone only made it worse.

Lucy had no response. They were right. She should do something with her life. Quit Crawley Books. Get a real job. Save up and move out. Be a proper adult.

But just the thought made her want to get in bed and hide under the covers.

“My baking does pretty well,” she said, voice quiet. She kept 70 percent of the sales for the baked goods she sold at the store, which was a decent profit.

Iffat tsked. “Baking is a hobby. We’re talking about a life. You can snap your fingers and bake! Anyone can bake!”

“You’re so smart, sweet pea,” Andrew said. “You shouldn’t let your potential go to waste like this.”

Lucy simply nodded. They didn’t mean to be hurtful, she knew. They just wanted her to do something important like they were, but she didn’t know what that would be.

She liked selling books. She liked baking. Beyond that, she was still figuring out what she really wanted to do. It wasn’t even that she financially needed a “real” job; she made decent money at the bookstore because she was the manager now. If push came to shove, she probably could afford to live on her own (though it certainly wouldn’t be as comfortably as she lived now), but her parents wanted her to do something extraordinary.

“Maybe now that the grandson is here, you’ll get the chance to leave,” Iffat said. Lucy’s brows furrowed.

“But I don’t want to,” Lucy said, hating how she sounded like a child. “I can’t leave Charles.”

Her parents exchanged a glance. Iffat sighed.

“He’s a nice enough old man, but I’ve never understood your attachment to him,” Andrew said.

Of course you don’t, Lucy thought to herself. But there was no point in speaking the words aloud.

Her parents finished their dinner while Lucy sat with her hands tightly folded in her lap, taking in measured breaths. Her mother and father finished simultaneously, rising at the same time. With a wave of their hands, they had the plates set in the dishwasher, another bit of magic pushing in their chairs. And they were gone.

They had been drawn to each other in college because they were both witches—yet even in the privacy of their own home, they only used their magic for practical purposes.

Lucy stayed at the table, feeling tired. She stared at her plate, at the unfinished yellow rice that had gone cold. She would never leave Charles.

When Charles’s wife, Sophie, had passed away while Lucy was a senior in high school, Lucy had bawled for weeks. Her parents didn’t understand why, but it was because she had always felt like Sophie and Charles were her real parents, and secretly, she had hoped they would adopt her one day, like Miss Honey did in Matilda.

It wasn’t that Lucy’s parents were evil like the Wormwood family had been. Nor was it that she was desperate to get away from them. It was just … they weren’t around much. And even when they were, it didn’t feel any better. It didn’t feel like they were hers.

Then, when she was six, she met Charles at Crawley Books. She had been drawn to the store—drawn to him, to his magic. Very quickly he had seen she was a witch and divulged that he was one, too. It only made the bookstore more special, and she begged her parents to drop her off there on the weekends.

Though Sophie wasn’t a witch, she and Charles both encouraged Lucy to experiment with her magic. It was Sophie who had inspired her to discover book-magic, and Charles who had helped her test it out until she perfected it.

Charles had already infused the store with magic: simple spells to make it feel comfortable for all who entered, to make sure there were never any bugs—but it was Lucy who first tried using magic directly on the customers to help them find their next favorite book.

She was sixteen then and had only been working part-time at Crawley Books for a few months. When she’d explained to Charles and Sophie what she’d done, they were overjoyed, eyes bright with pride. It was something she’d never felt from anyone else.

Lucy’s maternal grandparents were in Islamabad, and she’d only met them twice, since they didn’t visit New York and Iffat didn’t go to Pakistan much. Andrew’s parents had lived in Florida, like all retired white people from Long Island, and they had passed away when she was in middle school.

But Charles and Sophie—they were here. They loved her.

Lucy missed Sophie with an ache that never really went away. She missed seeing Sophie with Charles, too, how much they had loved each other. It had been brutal to watch Charles after Sophie died. To see him left behind, the grief he dealt with.

With a sigh, Lucy stood from the dining table, picking up her plate. She used magic to set it in the dishwasher while simultaneously pulling ingredients from the cabinets. It was time to bake.

With magic as her sous chef, she prepped the bakery items for tomorrow: apple fritters, chocolate chunk cookies with sea salt flakes, olive oil muffins, and mini molasses cakes. It took a few hours since she liked working slowly, savoring the process. She lost herself in whisking whipping cream by hand, something she could easily do with a spell or a machine but that she found therapeutic to do herself.

When she was done, she trudged up the steps, thoroughly exhausted. Her parents had gone to bed a long time ago; the house was quiet and dark. She went to her room, flicking on the lights, enveloped by the warmth there.