Lola and Wicce's grandmother-granddaughter relationship

Lola and Wicce's grandmother-granddaughter relationship is the most sustaining family bond in Lola’s story. Unlike Lola’s distant and contemptuous mother, the Wicce offers her granddaughter welcome, instruction, emotional honesty, and permission to choose her own future. Their connection links Lola’s private suffering to the inherited history of witches, while also giving her the courage to accept pregnancy, confront adulthood, and separate her identity from Mayumi May’s shadow.

Discovery and Family Background

The relationship becomes explicit when Lady Mary leads Lola through the Fort’s lavish corridor to a room where an elderly woman is lying on a bed. Lola recognizes her with a shocked “Grandma?!”; the meeting turns an apparently isolated period of grief and magical instruction into a reunion with the family elder who understands Lola’s inheritance. The Wicce is not simply an older relative. She is the grandmother who possesses knowledge of the family’s witch line and its succession pattern, and her presence gives Lola access to an identity that her mother has treated as a source of shame.

The family’s magic skips one generation. Lola inherited the witch gene, while her mother, Mayumi May, did not; instead, the non-witchy generation receives the ability to predict the future. This difference structures the hostility between mother and daughter. Mayumi May is a celebrated actor, former top model, philanthropist, social elite, and trophy wife to a business tycoon, yet she excludes Lola from family parties, leaves her upbringing to a live-in nanny, and criticizes her body. The Wicce’s role is therefore sharply contrasted with Mayumi May’s: where the mother withholds affection and approval, the grandmother provides context without demanding that Lola become smaller, prettier, or less magical.

Sanctuary, Instruction, and Disclosure

The Wicce becomes Lola’s companion during her weeks in the Fort and teaches her what would otherwise take years to learn in only days. This instruction is practical as well as symbolic. Lola is not merely being told about magic; she is being brought into a lineage that her mother’s public identity has concealed. The grandmother’s room functions as a protected space in which Lola can ask questions that cannot be safely or honestly asked elsewhere.

That protection is evident when the Wicce hears Valnoir outside. Lola tries to dismiss him as “Nobody,” but the Wicce insists that he be brought in. Later, when Lola has not told Valnoir about the possible pregnancy, the Wicce declares that he needs to know because it is his right. Her intervention places pregnancy within a network of responsibility rather than allowing Lola to carry the uncertainty alone. At the same time, she does not seize control of Lola’s decision. The Wicce speaks plainly, but her authority is used to support Lola’s agency rather than replace it.

The relationship also stands against the instrumental treatment of reproductive bodies elsewhere in the story. Sheridan identifies Maribel as the woman he has been looking for “To bear me a child,” while Shay rejects experiments on Gemma and an unborn child because those who cannot give informed consent must not be used as research subjects. Within this larger pattern, the Wicce’s insistence that Valnoir know about Lola’s pregnancy acknowledges the child as part of a moral relationship, not merely as a possession, biological resource, or dynastic solution.

The Mother’s Prophecy and Lola’s Reorientation

Lola asks the Wicce directly why Mayumi May hates her. The grandmother does not offer a sentimental excuse. She explains that when Lola was born, Mayumi May performed a tarot reading, saw something that disturbed her, pushed the cards back into the deck, and never revealed what the vision meant. Afterward, Mayumi May withdrew from Lola. The Wicce cannot identify the prophecy, and she cautions that predicting the future is imprecise: a word such as “stroke” might indicate illness, good fortune, or the birth of a child. The uncertainty matters because it prevents the prophecy from becoming a confirmed sentence of doom.

The Wicce nevertheless refuses to erase the damage caused by Mayumi May’s fear. She calls Mayumi May arrogant, conceited, vain, and a bad mother, while also explaining that the woman has hidden inside herself since the reading. This double judgment gives Lola a more complex account of her childhood: her mother’s cruelty may have originated in fear, but fear does not excuse abandonment. The grandmother validates both sides of Lola’s experience—the possibility that Mayumi May was wounded and the fact that Lola was still denied maternal care.

The decisive counsel comes when Lola asks whether she should try to speak to her mother. The Wicce tells her there is no point in seeking approval from someone who has gone too far. She urges Lola to make her own way and reminds her that she is about to become a mother herself. The statement “You are not your mother” becomes the relationship’s central inheritance. Lola leaves the conversation resolved not to repeat Mayumi May’s emotional absence, and the grandmother’s words transform pregnancy from a frightening complication into the beginning of a self-authored family future.

Pregnancy, Blessing, and Loss

Lola initially hesitates to take a pregnancy test. She has missed her period, wants a child, and fears that the pregnancy may force her to choose between Valnoir and the baby because Valnoir had said he did not want children. The Wicce recognizes what Lola cannot yet accept, telling her that she is going to be a mother and advising her to embrace it. After the lesson, Lola obtains a pregnancy test, receives a positive result, resigns from the hospital, and arranges a scan. The grandmother’s confidence is therefore followed by concrete action: Lola begins a new chapter rather than remaining trapped in uncertainty.

Their intimacy is expressed through small gestures as much as through revelations. After receiving the grandmother’s advice, Lola thanks her and places a gentle kiss on her forehead. That gesture reverses the usual direction of family care. The Wicce has taught, interpreted, and protected; Lola answers with gratitude and physical tenderness, recognizing the elder not only as a magical authority but as the beloved grandmother she has needed.

The bond ends abruptly. Lola notices that the Wicce sleeps more each day and understands that death is approaching, but foreknowledge does not soften the event. When Victoria and Viktor come to tell her that the Wicce has died, Lola feels as though her soul has been knocked out of her body and collapses into Viktor’s arms. The loss is especially severe because it follows so closely upon the Wicce’s emotional restoration of Lola. The grandmother gives Lola the means to leave the Fort and take hold of her life, but she does not remain to witness the child’s birth or the consequences of that choice.

Narrative Significance

The Wicce’s relationship with Lola supplies an alternative model of inheritance. Magic passes through the family according to a skipped generation, but affection and wisdom do not pass automatically; they must be actively offered. Mayumi May turns inherited difference into exclusion, whereas the Wicce turns it into recognition. Her teaching joins bodily inheritance, magical lineage, reproductive choice, and emotional self-definition in one relationship.

The bond also gives Lola a counterweight to the transactional structures surrounding her. Other characters frame children as ransom leverage, dynastic necessity, scientific material, or proof of possession. The Wicce instead helps Lola interpret pregnancy as a personal future that requires truth, responsibility, and choice. Her advice does not solve every danger, but it changes Lola’s position within them: Lola stops waiting for maternal approval, accepts that she is pregnant, leaves her hospital job, and begins to act as the author of her own family.

Because the Wicce dies immediately after this turning point, her influence persists as an internal instruction rather than an ongoing presence. Lola’s future motherhood is explicitly set against Mayumi May’s failures, and the grandmother’s last guidance becomes a standard by which Lola can measure the life she intends to create. Their relationship is therefore both a late-found refuge and a rite of passage: the Wicce receives Lola as a granddaughter, teaches her as a witch, blesses her as a future mother, and leaves her prepared—though grieving—to continue without her.