Miranda, who has a pre-existing pica eating disorder, descends into depression and ultimately suffers a mental break that results in a five-month clinic stay.

Meanwhile Miranda continues to lose weight due to her eating disorder and begins to show characteristics (appearances, behaviours, idiolects) of the deceased women from her maternal line, to the extent that her own twin mistakes her for their mother.

The Silver House reveals that Anna Good (Miranda's great-grandmother) was the one to bring it to life with a curse after her husband died in Africa in WWII, fighting the Germans.

Miranda heads to Cambridge alone, where she begins a romantic relationship with a girl named Ore, who is of Nigerian descent.

Ore often references the Caribbean folk story of the soucouyant, who is an old woman that abandons her skin at night to feed on the souls of others.

The Silver House and its ghosts are enraged that Miranda has fallen in love with a black woman, and turn their violent tendencies against her and Ore.

She splits Miranda's skin open "like a bad nut" and it falls off, revealing the long-haired girl from the photo—Miranda before her breakdown.

This Miranda desperately tries to climb back into the skin, while Ore manages to escape the house (with help from Sade) and goes home.

After Ore leaves, Miranda steels herself to fight the Silver House and its ghosts, deciding that she can't be "herself plus all her mothers."

Eliot has made her a pie from the all-season apples (which the Silver House produces), but Miranda refuses to eat it, thinking he is trying to poison her.

"[4] Writing in Callaloo, Aspasia Stephanou praised White Is for Witching for subverting "the conventional and metaphorical associations of vampirism with the “foreign” other, as the British Nigerian Ore draws upon her knowledge of the soucouyant in order to try to understand and explain the dangerous matriarchal line of Miranda Silver’s British ancestors.