The Two Sides of Draco Malfoy | Dramione (Harry Potter) Fanfiction

Some men wear two faces. Some wear one mask so long the skin forgets its shape beneath. He was an aura by day, something else by night, and the woman who would unmake him was already opening the file. We begin the story now. The case room on the fourth floor of the ARA office smelled of cold tea and older paper. Hermayan Granger arrived 12 minutes early, as she always did, and set her satchel on the long oak table with a soft, deliberate sound of a woman who intended to be undisturbed for the next several hours. The lamps along the wall had not yet been lit. Morning came reluctantly to this part of the ministry in February. The enchanted windows showed a pearl gray sky pressed flat against nothing. And somewhere beyond the glass a draft moved that was not quite wind. She unrolled the case file across the table and weighted its corners with the small brass paper weights the archivists kept in a basket by the door. Nullis Rex. The name had a Latin elegance that grated on her. She had always distrusted men who needed a dead language to feel important. 5 years of investigations, three squads through the file. No arrests. The cell moved the way smoke moves. Present in the room until you turn to look at it and then nowhere at all. She had asked for this case. She had asked twice. Footsteps in the corridor. She knew them before she heard the door. The measured, unhurried cadence of someone who had learned to walk like a man who owned the floor he crossed. The door opened on the soft brass click of a properly oiled hinge, and Draco Malfoy stepped into the case with a folder under one arm, and the unbothered expression of a man who had been told perhaps an hour ago with whom he would be working. Granger, Malfoy, a handful of consonants between them, neither warm nor cold. He closed the door. He did not offer his hand, and she did not offer hers, and somewhere in that small mutual restraint, a great deal was already said. He was thinner than she remembered. The robes suited him in the way uniforms always suited the disciplined. The scarlet collar high, the silver clasps catching what little light the room had, the cut precise across the shoulders. His hair was shorter than it had been at school, neat at the temples, paler now in certain lights, like winter wheat. She noticed the glove on his left hand, soft black dragonhide, fitted close to the wrist. She noticed it because he was not yet inside, not yet at the table, and the right hand was bare, while the left was not. He sat across from her, not beside. The geography of the seating arrangement was its own small statement. "Robarts said you'd been read in," he said. His voice had lost the school boy draw. It was lower now with a burr of something practiced. The voice of a man who gave testimony in courtrooms. I assume you've reviewed the standing reports. All of them, she said, including yours. A pause, half a breath, then a small courteous incline of his head. Good. Then we needn't waste the morning on history. On the contrary, Hermione said, opening the topmost folder with a flick of her want tip, and pinning a square of parchment to the air between them, with a charm that hung it steady as a portrait. I should very much like to discuss the history, specifically the raid in Bristol 18 months ago, November the 3rd. The parchment hung between them, a field report in his own hand. She had read it twice on the train this morning and three times the night before. He looked at it without leaning forward. What about it? You wrote that the safe house had been abandoned for at least 72 hours when your team arrived. That's correct. Ora Pritchard's account filed the same evening describes a kettle still warm on the hob, a pause that was not quite long enough to be a pause, less than a breath, a flicker perhaps, beneath the skin of his throat, where the collar sat high. Pritchard had a sentimental relationship with detail, Draco said. He felt the room was warm, the kettle was cold. I touched it. His tone was mild, almost amused. If you'd like a sworn deposition on the temperature of the kettle, I can arrange one. The Hob is regrettably deceased. She did not smile. It isn't the kettle, Malfoy. It's that this is the third report of yours I've read, in which the timeline slips by precisely the margin that would have allowed an informed party to leave the premises. The room went very still. He did not move exactly, but something in him settled. The way a dualist settles before the first lift of a wand, the way a man arranges his weight, so that whatever comes, it will not knock him over. His gray eyes did not leave hers. You're accusing me of something, Granger. Be sporting and use the word. I'm not accusing you of anything, she said. I'm asking a question. You're asking three. Then answer them in any order you like. For a moment, neither of them spoke. The enchanted window flickered once, the gray beyond it darkening half a shade as a cloud passed over the imaginary sky. The lamps along the wall, sensing the hour, lit themselves in soft sequence. 1 2 3 Each small flame waking with a particular blue-edged glow of ministry oil. Draco lifted his bare right hand and laid it flat on the table. Not a fist, a palm open. The gesture of a man placing a card he was not yet ready to turn over. Three years on this case, he said quietly. Six raids, two informants killed before we could move them. I have written 97 reports. If you have come here looking for slips in my arithmetic, Granger, I will save you the trouble of reading the other 94. I am tired. We are all tired. Mistakes happen. Mistakes? She repeated. Yes. In your reports. Yes. All in the same direction. This time the silence had weight. It pressed down on the parchment hanging between them. It pressed against the lamps. It filled the small distance between his open hand and her closed one, and made of that distance a country. He inclined his head a second time, smaller, almost a concession, almost not. What would you like me to do, Ara Granger? She closed the folder. The pinned parchment dissolved into smoke with a flick of her wand. She stood and she walked the length of the table to the sideboard where the archivists kept the kettle and she put it on. She did this with her back to him because she did not in that moment trust her face. He is lying. The thought arrived not as a thunderclap but as something quieter, more domestic. the small exact click of a key turning in a lock. She had been a long time at this work. She knew the shape of a lie when she heard one. The shape of his was unusual. It was very smooth, very practiced, and underneath the smoothness there was what? Not fear. Something older than fear. Something that had learned to live with itself. He is lying and he knows that I know. She turned, leaned her hip against the sideboard, folded her arms. I would like, she said, to start from the beginning together. I would like to walk the timeline of the cell from the first reported sighting in 99 to the silence of last August. I would like when we disagree to disagree on the record. And I would like you to know, Malfoy, that I am not a person who lets things go. I am aware. Good. He stood. He moved with that same economical grace. No flourish to it, no school boy posture. He crossed to the sideboard and reached past her for the second cup. A courtesy, nothing more. his sleeve brushing nothing, his gloved hand careful not to come too near her own. But she was close enough to see the silver beneath the dragon hide. The glove had ridden up by a fraction of the wrist as he reached a band of metal, plain, dull, unornnamented. A ring worn beneath a glove was a ring meant to be hidden. He saw her see it. He did not adjust the glove. He did not flinch. He poured the tea, hers first, a small mercy of manners, and handed her the cup with his bare right hand, and the gloved left stayed loose at his side as though it had nothing whatever to conceal. "To a productive partnership," he said, lifting his own cup. "To the truth," she answered. The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile, the memory of one perhaps, or the rumor. He took a sip of his tea and watched her over the rim of the cup, with eyes the color of the imaginary sky beyond the window, gray and overcast, and giving nothing away. She sat back down at the table. So did he. The case file lay open between them, like a country neither of them had yet agreed to map. By noon they had worked through 99 and the first half of 2000. By three they had reached the Bristol raid again, this time she did not ask about the kettle. She watched his hands instead. He took notes with the right. The left rested on his thigh beneath the table out of sight. Twice he flexed it, small, involuntary, and she thought, "The ring is too tight, or he has trained himself to forget it is there, and the body has not agreed." At 5:00, the lamps brightened to their evening burn. At 6, the corridor outside emptied. The building made the small settling sounds of a place releasing its workers into the rain that had begun somewhere in the imaginary sky to fall. He closed the last folder. He stacked the parchments with the neat square gestures of a man for whom order was a kind of refuge. Tomorrow, he said, 8. Half 8. He gathered his cloak from the hook by the door. He paused there, one hand on the brass, and for the smallest measure of time, he did not turn the handle. She thought he would say something. She could not have said why she thought so, only that the air in the room had gone briefly thin, the way air does before a question that does not in the end arrive. He turned the handle. He inclined his head to her, formal, almost courtly, and was gone. The door clicked shut behind him. Hermione sat in the half-lit room a long while after he had left. The kettle had gone cold on the sideboard. The parchment in front of her bore his handwriting in the precise, elegant slant of a man who had been taught to write at six, and had never permitted himself to be sloppy since. She traced a line of it with the pad of her thumb once, twice, a ring beneath a glove. She rolled her sleeves down. She closed the file. She sat in the lamplight with the rain beginning to whisper against the enchanted window and a feeling settling in her chest that she did not yet have a name for. A small attentive pressure like a hand laid flat between the ribs and a quiet unwelcome certainty that she had just stepped onto a path from which the way back was already shorter than the way forward. She picked up her quill. She did not yet write anything down. The aura archive lived three floors beneath the courtrooms in a wing the architects had cheerfully forgotten. To reach it, one walked a corridor that smelled of beeswax and damp stone, past portraits of long deadad heads of office who slept in their frames with their mouths open. The door at the end was ironbound and warded. It recognized Hermione's wand at the second tap and opened on the soft pneumatic sigh of a room that had not been entered since the previous night. She let the door close behind her. The archive welcomed her as it always did, with a particular hush of paper kept too long, with the dry papery scent of old ink, with the slow tick of the brass index clock above the catalog. Rows of shelves stretched away into a dim that the lamps never quite resolved. Somewhere in the middle distance, a stack of files rearranged itself with a small private rustle, as though the archive were turning over in its sleep. She had come at 9. She had told no one she was coming. The Bristol report was where she had left it the day before, in the working stack she kept on the second table from the door. around it. She had begun to build a small architecture of cross references, duty rosters, requisition slips, the night shift signin book from the aura office. Not yet a case against him, not yet an accusation, a scaffolding, only the kind a careful builder put up before she knew what she meant to build. She sat. She opened the duty roster. It was a long, thankless kind of work, the work she did best. She moved her fingertip down the columns. Bristol, the 3rd of November. Authorized personnel. Malfoy D. Pritchard A. Yakley Jones M. Auja R. Signature on dispatch Malfoy D. Time of dispatch 10:46 in the evening. Time of arrival on site 11:22. Distance from apparition point to safe house. A quarter of a mile on foot by his own description in the report. A quarter of a mile, 36 minutes. She read it again. 36 minutes for a quarter of a mile. In a hurry in the dark, she set her quill in the inkwell with the small, deliberate gesture of a woman who has just confirmed something she did not in fact wish to confirm. The door to the archive opened. She did not look up. She did not need to. The cadence of the footstep on the flag stone told her everything. She had spent 10 hours in a room with that footstep yesterday, and the body it transpired was a faster student than the mind. Granger. Malfoy, you're not in the case room. I'm aware. He crossed to her table. He was carrying two paper cups from the atrium kiosk, and the second cup he sat down beside her elbow without comment or flourish, as though delivering tea to a colleague in an archive at 9 was a thing he had done a 100 times. The cup was hot through the paper. The tea was the right color. He had evidently asked the kiosk witch how she took it, or more probably, he had watched her pour her own yesterday and remembered. She did not thank him. Neither of them, she suspected, would have known what to do with the thanks. You're working on the roster, he said. I'm working on the timeline. The same thing in this instance, she said. Yes. He sat across the table again. He did not remove his cloak. He set his own cup down and folded his bare hand around it, and the gloved one rested on the wood beside, fingers loose, the silver hidden. 36 minutes, he said. She lifted her eyes to his. He was watching her with the steady, unhurried attention of a man who had decided somewhere between the corridor and the table, not to be evasive about this particular thing. 36 minutes, she agreed. It was raining, he said. The lane was flooded at the western end. We went round. Your report doesn't mention the flood. My report was filed at 4 in the morning by a man who had been hexed twice in the shoulder. My report is not a poem, Granger. It records what happened. It does not record the weather. The weather, she said, is on this occasion the entire question. A small movement at the corner of his mouth. Not amusement, acknowledgement. Then write it in, he said. Amend the file. I'll counter sign. He said it lightly, too lightly. The lightness was itself a kind of tell. The lightness of a man stepping over a board he knew to be loose. She watched his gloved hand on the table. The fingers did not tighten. They did not need to. The very stillness of them was the tightening. She did not in that moment accuse him. She had been an aura long enough to know that accusations made too early were arrows shot before the bow was drawn. She closed the duty roster. She drew the Bristol report toward her instead and turned it so that it faced him. "Walk me through it," she said from the apparition point slowly. He walked her through it. He was very good. He was, she thought, almost unfairly good. The kind of good that came from having told the same story many times to many different rooms. The flood at the western end of the lane, the detour through the hedge, the hound that had barked from a farmhouse two fields over and made them go to ground for four minutes by his watch. The kettle on the hob cold. He said he had touched it. Pritchard had been mistaken. Pritchard had been hexed in the shoulder, too. Pritchard had not, in fact, been the one to lay a hand on the iron. He spoke for nearly an hour. She did not interrupt. When he had finished, the archives brass clock had ticked through 43 of its small, patient minutes, and the tea between them had gone cold. "Thank you," she said. He inclined his head. "Malfoy Granger, if I find," she said very quietly, that the flood at the western end of that lane did not on that night exist, what would you say to me? His eyes did not leave hers. For the space of one breath, two, she had the impression of looking at a man who was deciding behind the gray between several different answers and choosing in the end none of them. I would say, he answered, that you should check the parish weather records before you ask me again. He rose. He left his tea untouched on the table. He inclined his head with that small, almost courtly gesture he had used at the door yesterday, and he went. The archive door breathed shut behind him. Hermione sat with the cold cup between her palms and listened to the brass clock tick. Somewhere in the middle distance, another stack of files turned over in its sleep. She did not move for a long minute. Then she stood and she walked to the catalog and she requested the parish weather records for Avon the 3rd of November 18 months prior by date and grid coordinate. The records were there in 9 minutes. The archive was efficient about weather. It had rained that night in Bristol. It had rained heavily. The lane he had named had indeed flooded at the western end. She sat back in her chair and stared at the small printed line of the parish almanac. For a length of time, she could not afterwards have measured. He had told her the truth. He had told her the truth. And she was. She made herself name it because she was a person who named things. She was disappointed, not relieved. disappointed. The disappointment surprised her more than the relief would have, and she sat with it for a long, uncomfortable moment before she folded the almanac shut and pressed the heel of her hand against her brow. He had told her the truth about the flood, which meant he had told her the truth about the detour, which meant the 36 minutes had a clean explanation, which meant which meant nothing, which meant only that this particular thread was not the one that would unravel him. It did not mean there was no thread. She gathered her papers. She left the archive at 11. The raid order came down at 20 3 that afternoon. Robards stood at the head of the briefing room with a map of a row of houses in Lambeath, pinned to the wall behind him, and Hermione stood at the back beside Draco, and listened to a plan she had not herself designed. Intelligence had placed three of the Nullles Rex operatives at a property on Halwell Street. The warrant had been signed by the duty magistrate at 3. Departure in 20 minutes. She glanced sideways at Draco. He was watching Robards with a flat, attentive expression of a man receiving instructions. His gloved hand hung loose at his side. He did not look at her. He had not looked at her since they had assembled. The apparition point was a brick alley behind a lingerette. The rain that had been merely a rumor in the morning had become by 3 a thin and steady fall that darkened the shoulders of every cloak in the team within seconds of arrival. Hermione drew her wand. Beside her, Draco drew his. On my mark, Robard said quietly. Granger and Malfoy the back. Pritchard Ahua the front. Yaxley Jones the roof. They moved. The house on Hallowell Street was three stories of soot darkened brick with a black painted door and curtains drawn at every window. Hermione and Draco went down the side passage at a half run ones low. He moved well. She had not in 18 hours of knowing him again ever seen him move quickly, and she registered with a part of her mind not currently occupied, that he was lighter on his feet than she would have guessed. A dualist's economy. No wasted motion. The cloak gathered in his free hand so that it did not catch on the brick. The back door was warded. He read the ward in two seconds and broke it in three. They went through. The kitchen was empty. The kettle was cold. The kettle was cold and the hob was cold. and the air had the still papered quality of a room that had been left some hours ago by people who had taken their warmth with them. A teacup on the table held an inch of liquid with a skin of cream gone faintly gray across the top. Half a loaf, the cut side already drying, a coat hook by the door with nothing on it. Hermione stood in the center of the kitchen and let the small cold knowledge settle in her chest. They had been here. They had been here recently, and someone had told them in the last 2 hours to go. She turned her head a fraction. Draco was at the threshold of the kitchen, wands still raised, eyes scanning the corner where the corridor ran back into the dark of the house. His profile in the gray light from the window was very still. He did not look at her. He did not look at the teacup or the loaf or the coat hook with nothing on it. He looked at the corridor. She thought with a clarity that arrived from nowhere and arranged itself on the kitchen floor between them like a third presence. He knew. He knew before we apparated. she thought. He is not even surprised. He turned his head then and met her eyes across the empty kitchen. Whatever was in his face was gone before she could read it. The gray resettled. His wand came down a fraction, professional, controlled. Clear, he called over his shoulder to the team beyond. Clear at the back. His voice was steady. It was steady the way a hand is steady when it has been trained against every impulse of the body not to shake. Outside the rain went on falling on Halwell Street. And somewhere upstairs Pritchard called clear. And somewhere on the roof Yaxley Jones called clear, and Hermione Granger stood in a kitchen that smelled faintly of bread and absent men, and did not did not yet lower her wand. The witness lived in Wiltshire. That was what the file said. A Clark's note, three lines pinned to the inside cover of a folder Robards had handed Hermione the following morning without ceremony. Subject: Eloise Greengrass, second cousin to the Malfoy line. Believed to have hosted unspecified gatherings at the family seat during the war years, cooperative under caution. Address: Malfoy Manor, Wiltshire. Hermione read the three lines twice. The address sat at the bottom of the page in the cler's careful copper plate, and her eyes returned to it as though to a small bright object placed deliberately in her path. "You don't have to come," she said to Draco when she put the file in front of him at the caseroom table. She said it without preamble and without looking at him because she did not on this particular question wish to be observed. He read the three lines. He read them, she noticed only once. I'll come. I can take Pritchard. You can, he said. But you won't get past the front gate without my hand on the wards. The house has been particular since the trial. a pause. The smallest of pauses. I'll come. She closed the folder. She did not argue with him. She did not, in the silence that followed, look at him either, and he did not, in the same silence, look at her. They apparated at noon. The lane that led to the gates of Malfoy Manor was bordered by lime trees that had been planted by the look of them in the reign of a queen long enough dead that no one remembered her face. The trees had gone bare for winter. Their bark was the gray of old puter, and their branches met overhead in a vaultting her found against her will beautiful. The gravel beneath her boots was rad. Somewhere a peacock cried. A thin ugly sound abruptly cut off like a violin string snapping. The gates were wrought iron and twice her height. Draco laid his bare right hand flat against the cold metal. The iron warmed under his palm. The gates opened inward without a sound. He did not, she noticed, walk through immediately. He stood a moment on the threshold of his own house, the gloved hand at his side, the bare one falling away from the iron, and his face arranged itself in a stillness she had not in three days of working with him yet seen. It was not the stillness of yesterday's empty kitchen. It was older. It was the stillness, she thought, of a man entering a room he had been trying for several years not to enter. He stepped through. She followed. The drive was long. They walked it side by side and did not speak. The manor rose at the end of it like a sentence she had read once in a book she had thrown away. its gray stone, its leaded windows, its rows of chimneys against the bone white February sky. A house that had in another life been beautiful and had not forgotten it, and had not forgiven the fact that no one else remembered. The door was opened by an elderly elf in a clean tea towel. He did not speak. He inclined his head to Draco, a small exact gesture, and held the door, and his eyes did not, for any portion of a second, find Hermione's face. She was grateful for it. She had not, until that moment, known how grateful she would be. Inside, the air was cold. Not the cold of a house left unheated. The cold of a house heated by people who did not themselves need warmth. A long entrance hall floored in black and white marble. A staircase rising to the right. A portrait of the first landing of a woman in dove gray silk whose painted eyes followed them across the hall in the unblinking way of portraits that had been instructed by their sitter to be watchful. Miss Greengrass is in the small drawing room, said the elf very quietly, to a point in the air slightly to Draco's left. Sir, thank you, Tippen. Draco turned to the left. Hermione followed. She did not, until they were three paces into the corridor, understand which drawing room he meant. He stopped at a door. He laid his bare hand on the brass of the knob and he did not turn it. He did not look at her. It's this one, he said, or the other. Green grass is in the small one. The small one is a fractional pause through here. She understood then with a clarity that arrived neatly and at once that the small drawing room was the drawing room, that he had walked her by the most direct route available to the door of the room in which she had screamed on the floor 5 years earlier with his aunt's knife at her throat. that he was telling her this now at the threshold because he had decided somewhere between the gate and the corridor that he would not let her cross it without warning. She did not for a moment trust herself to speak. Is there another way? She said her voice came out level. She was proud of it distantly in the way one is proud of a stranger. There's the long way through the orery. It adds 11 minutes. 11 minutes. Yes. Take it. He inclined his head. He turned. She followed him back along the corridor and through a smaller door and down a passage she had not on the first visit ever seen and into an orery whose glass roof had gone milky with age and whose lemon trees in tubs of Italian marble had survived a war and a trial and were against everything still bearing small sour fruit. The air in the orery was warmer. It smelled of citrus leaves and the slow particular damp of a glass house in winter. She did not look at him. He did not look at her. They walked the length of the orangangery in a silence that was not exactly comfortable, but was something else. A silence with weight in it. A silence that was carrying between them something that neither of them had named. and neither of them yet intended to. At the far end he opened a second door and they came out into a corridor she did not recognize and three doors down on the right was the small drawing room. Eloise Greengrass was 62, white-haired and uninterested in cooperating. She received them in a chint armchair by a small fire that did not, Hermione thought, give off any warmth. She answered the prepared questions with answers her solicitor had clearly drafted. She referred to the war years as the unpleasantness. She offered tea and was, when Hermione declined, visibly relieved. The interview took 40 minutes. They learned from it almost nothing. Hermione had expected this. The point of the interview, as Robards had said dryly the previous afternoon, was not what Eloise Greengrass would tell them. The point was to put a foot in the door of a house that had until now kept its doors closed. When it was finished, Eloise rose, inclined her head a precise half inch, and said to Draco, "Your mother would have offered you lunchon." "My mother is in France." "Yes," a pause. "Tippen will see you out." Tippen saw them out. He did not again look at Hermione's face. She was again grateful. They walked back down the drive in silence. The lime trees vaulted over them. The peacock somewhere did not cry a second time. At the gates, Draco laid his hand again against the iron, and the iron warmed again, and the gates opened outward, and they stepped through onto the lane. He did not immediately apperate. He stood on the gravel with his bare hand at his side and the gloved one folded against his sleeve and he looked not at her but at the lime trees and he said in a voice she had to lean a little to hear. I should have taken you the long way the first time too. She did not for a moment understand him. Then she did. She stood very still on the gravel beside him. The February sky was the color of an unwritten page. A wind moved through the lime branches and made the small dry sound of bones turning in a box. She did not look at him. He did not look at her. The space between them, 18 in perhaps, of cold lane, held for the length of a breath, an apology that was not in any of the prepared forms, and was not, by any official measure an apology at all, and was in some other measure. She did not have language for exactly that. She said, "I know." That was all she said. She did not look at him when she said it. He did not look at her. He inclined his head once small and he raised his wand and they apparated back to London and they did not speak of it again that day or the next. That night in his flat in Bloomsbury, Draco Malfoy sat at his writing desk under a green shaded lamp and pulled a clean sheet of parchment toward him. The flat was sparely furnished. A leather chair by an unlit fire. A shelf of books arranged by language and then by date. A decanter on a side table, half full of something amber, untouched since the autumn. The silver ring on his left hand had bitten the skin beneath the glove all day. He had taken the glove off at the door, and the ring sat now in plain view on his finger, dull and unornamented and old. He dipped his quill. Granger. He stopped. He looked at the word. He drew a line through it. Hermione. He stopped again. He drew a line through that, too. He sat for a long time with the quill held above the parchment and a small slow tremor in the muscle at the base of his thumb that he did not for several minutes notice. When he did notice it, he set the quill down. He folded the parchment in half. He folded it again. He held it for a moment between his hands, the silver ring catching the lamplight. And then he opened the small iron stove beside the desk and laid the parchment on the embers and watched it curl and blacken and go. He did not write the letter. He did not, in fact, write any letter. He sat at the desk a long while after the parchment had gone to ash, and he did not move, and the lamp burned green and steady, and the silver bit into his finger, and somewhere in the floor below a clock struck the third quarter 11. He had not in 5 years apologized to her in any sentence that contained the word sorry. He had walked her the long way through his own house. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes. He held it there. He did not, when he lowered it, look at the small fire in the stove where the parchment had been. He blew out the lamp instead, and he sat in the dark of his sitting room, with the silver ring on his finger, and the rain beginning in Bloomsbury to fall against the window. and he did not that night sleep. The second raid came 11 days later. 11 days in which Hermione had not slept well and had told herself each morning at her wash basin that it was the case. The case was a perfectly respectable thing to lose sleep over. Three years cold, six raids dry, a cell that moved like smoke. any honest aura with the file in her keeping would be awake at 4. She would say this to herself in the mirror and meet her own eyes and look away first. The intelligence this time came through Yaxley Jones, a property in Spittlefields, an upstairs room above a clock makers, a meeting set for 10 in the evening of the 14th. Roards signed the warrant at 6. They assembled in the briefing room at 8 in a rain that had been falling in London for 2 days without remission. Draco was already there when she arrived. He was at the long table at the back of the room, his cloak across the chair beside him, his wand laid out on the wood in front of him, in the way some dualists laid out their wands before a match, not for show, but because they liked before a fight to look at the thing that would do the work. He was sharpening the focus with a small piece of dragonhide. He did not in their three weeks of working together ever do this in front of anyone else. He looked up when she came in. He did not today incline his head. Granger Malfoy. She sat opposite him. The cloak between them on his chair was darker at the shoulders where the rain had not yet dried. He had, she realized, come in from the street. He did not ordinarily take the street. He set the dragon hide aside. He put the wand in his sleeve. "The clock maker's shop is mine," he said. She raised her eyes to his. "Mine to know," he amended very evenly. "Not mine to own. I have been inside it twice. The stair to the upstairs room comes up on the left as you enter the back passage. The door at the top is ironbanded. There is a second exit through a coal hatch in the floor that lets out into the cellar of the habedashes next door. I have told Robards he has put Pritchard on the Habadash's cellar. She listened to him with her hands folded on the table. You have been inside it twice, she said. Yes. In what capacity? A pause. It was not a long pause. He did not on this occasion look away. In the capacity, he said, of an aura following a lead that did not in the end produce an arrest. When? August and November of last year. Neither of which appears in the file. They appear, he said, in my private notes. They will appear in the file by the end of this week. I should have filed them sooner. I did not. The honesty of it was so plain, so unornnamented that she found she could not for a moment answer it. She had been ready for a parry. She had not been ready to be handed the sword. She inclined her head. Once small. Thank you, she said. He did not say you're welcome. He folded the dragon hide into a small square and put it in his pocket and looked briefly past her shoulder at the door as though he were checking that no one had come in while they were speaking. No one had. They apperated to Spittlefields at 5 to 10. The rain was not heavy now, but it was steady. the kind of rain that wetted the shoulders of a cloak within a minute of arrival and went on quietly soaking through. The clock maker's shop sat at the corner of a narrow lane that smelled of cold smoke and wet brick. Its sign hung from a rot iron arm. The guilt had gone from the letters years ago, and the painted face of a clock on the board had stopped in the artist's hand at 20 3. Pritchard went down the area steps to the habedash's cellar with a hua behind him. Yaxley Jones took the alley at the back. Hermione and Draco went to the front door of the clock makers, and Draco laid his bare right hand on the wood, and the lock yielded without ceremony. The shop was dark. A bell on the inside of the door had been wedged with a folded cloth. He had, Hermione realized, done this himself on a previous visit, and left the cloth in place. They stepped through into the close, ticking dark. The shops smelled of brass and machine oil, and the dry, dusty heat of clocks running steadily in the absence of anyone to wind them. A long case clock by the back wall measured out the seconds in a deep, patient swing. Smaller clocks on the shelves ticked at their own faster rates, and the room as a whole made the layered sound of a heart that did not quite agree with itself about its pace. They moved through to the back passage. Draco was ahead. The stair came up on the left, as he had said. He went up it on the balls of his feet, his wand low, and she went up behind him with her wand low, too. and the long case clock down below struck in its deep voice the hour. The door at the top of the stair was ironbanded as he had said. He read the wards with the same two second economy he had used on Hallowell Street. He laid his hand on the door. He looked back once at her. She nodded. He opened the door. There were four men in the upstairs room. There should have been three. The intelligence had said three. There were four. The fourth was standing behind the door. And the fourth was already raising his wand. And the curse that came out of his wand was a thin, fast, ugly thing the color of bile. And it was not by any reading of the geometry of the room going to miss. It was not aimed at Draco. It was aimed at her. Several things happened in the next half second. She would afterwards never be able to lay them in their proper order. The half second refused in memory to be cut into its parts. There was the curse, low and fast on its course toward her ribs. There was her own wand coming up two beats too slow. There was a shout from somewhere. Yaxley Jones on the roof kicking in a skylight. There was Draco. Draco's hand closed on her wrist. His grip was not gentle. He pulled her toward him and around him in a single hard motion that turned the line of her body 90° out of the curse's path. And the curse went past her ear with a sound like a knife being drawn from a sheath. And it struck the doorframe behind her, and the door frame split with a dry, splintering crack. And Draco's wand, she had not in any of the half seconds seen him raise it, was already in the air above her shoulder, and the man behind the door went down with a soundless, boneless fall. The other three were rising. The three turned out to be easier than the fourth. 2 minutes, perhaps less. Yaxley Jones came in through the skylight. Pritchard came up the coal hatch. By a quart 10, the four men were bound. The room was held, and Hermione Granger was standing very still in the center of an upstairs room above a clock maker's shop, with a gloved hand still closed around her right wrist. Draco was not, she realized, letting go. She looked down at the glove. She looked up at his face. He was looking at her with an expression she had not seen on him before. It was not the careful neutrality of the case room. It was not the courteous restraint of the corridor outside the small drawing room. His eyes were not at that moment gray in any sense she had previously meant by gray. They had gone the color of a sky immediately before a storm broke. And there was behind them an unguarded thing. His hand on her wrist was warm through the dragon hide. The gloved thumb sat directly over the pulse at the base of her palm. She could feel her own pulse against it, quick, far quicker than it should have been three full minutes after a duel. And she could feel beneath the leather the small hard band of the silver ring on his third finger pressed against the inside of her wrist. He let go. He let go a beat after he should have. Not two beats, one. But she felt the one. And he felt that she had felt it. and he stepped back half a pace and turned away to bind the man behind the door with a flick of his wand and did not for the next several minutes look at her face. They got back to the ministry at midnight. The processing took until 2. The four men were entered into the holding cells with their wands tagged and their names three names real. The fourth name, Pritchard, observed flatly, not a name they had seen before, written into the nightbook. Robards came down in his dressing gown at half one and clapped Draco on the shoulder and said, "Good work, Malfoy." And Draco inclined his head and said nothing. At 2, she found him in the case room. He was at the long table. He had taken off the gloves at last, both of them, the left as well as the right, and the silver ring on his third finger sat plainly in the lamplight. He was writing the report. His handwriting tonight was not quite its usual neat slant. It was, she noticed, very slightly hurried at the right edge of the page, as though the hand had not entirely returned yet from the upstairs room. She closed the case room door behind her. She did not at once sit. She crossed to the sideboard. The kettle had been put on by someone, Pritchard, probably. He was kind that way, and the tea inside it was still hot. She poured two cups. She brought them to the table. She set one cup in front of him. She set the other in front of the chair beside his, not the chair opposite. She sat in the chair beside his. He did not for a moment look up from the page. When he did, the lamp light caught the silver ring on his hand on the table beside her cup. And the silver ring sat between them in the small space the lamp made. And she put her own hand on the table, not touching his 3 in perhaps, of varnished oak between her smallest finger and the band of his ring. and she said very quietly, "I have a file." He waited. "It's the witness list for the Greengrass interview, crossindexed against the gathering rosters from 97. It isn't mine to share with you. Robards has it under seal. I copied it this afternoon." She slid a folded square of parchment across the 3 in of oak between them. Her fingers, when she withdrew them, did not quite tremble. He looked down at the parchment. He looked up at her face. He did not, for the length of a breath, pick the parchment up. "Granger," he said. His voice was lower than it had been all evening. "Why?" She didn't answer at once. She lifted her cup. The tea was very hot. She set it down without drinking, and she looked at his hand on the table beside the parchment, the silver ring, dull and unornamented and old. And she said, "Because you put your hand on my wrist tonight, and you did not have to." He closed his hand around the parchment. He did not open it. He held it. His knuckles against the silver ring went white for a moment, and then they did not, and his hand on the table was very still, and somewhere in the building above them, a door shut on its own hinge, and the case room lamp gave its soft, small evening sound of oil settling in a brass reservoir, and he did not, for a long moment, take the parchment from the table. His thumb moved once against the fault. He still did not lift it. The cell met in a disused tannery on the aisle of dogs. Draco knew the way without thinking. He had walked it 11 times in the last two years, each time by a different route, each time with the small, methodical care of a man whose habits would, if discovered, kill him. Tonight the route was Limehouse to West India Dock by the south side of the canal, a doubled back loop through a stable yard that smelled of straw and ammonia and a final approach along the river wall where the wind off the water made the cloak crack at his ankles like a sail. He had Hermione's folded parchment in the inside pocket of his coat. He had not opened it. He had carried it from the case room table at 2 in the morning to his flat in Bloomsbury at 3, and he had laid it on the writing desk under the green shaded lamp, and he had not opened it. He had sat in the leather chair until the sky began to gray at the window. Then he had risen, washed, dressed, gone to the ministry, worked a full day at the long table opposite Hermione Granger, and walked out at 6:00 with the parchment still folded in his inside pocket, untouched. He had not opened it because he knew if he opened it, what he would do. He would read it. He would memorize it in the way he had been trained to memorize documents in his second life. Once for the words, once for the shape of the words on the page, once for the gaps between them. And then he would walk to the tannery and he would hand the names in it to the man in the long room upstairs and the cell would be moved and the witnesses would be moved and one of them possibly two would not in a fortnight be alive. He had carried the parchment for 18 hours and not opened it because the not opening was the last refusal left to him. The tannery rose at the end of the river wall, a low black bulk against the lower sky. The lamps had not been lit in its windows in 12 years. The door at the side, hidden behind a stack of broken pallets, recognized the press of his bare hand. He went in. The man at the top of the stairs went by the name Corvis. It was not his name. Draco had known the man's real name since the second meeting. He had also known by the third that to use it would be to die. Corvvis was tall, thin, and dressed in the manner of a country squire from 40 years before. Tweed, a watch chain, polished brown shoes. He was reading when Draco came in a small leatherbound book of Catalus in the original Latin. He marked his place with a slip of green ribbon. He set the book down. You're late, Mr. Malfoy. By 4 minutes. By 4 minutes. A smile that did not move the eyes. You used to be punctual to the second. I used to have less to do. Yes, Corvvis gestured at the chair opposite. The aura office keeps you busy. We are of course grateful. Draco sat. He did not on entering this room ever take off his coat. He had worn the silver mask on three occasions in this room and not worn it on eight. Corvvis had a theory which he had once explained over a glass of something French. that a man who wore a mask in front of his masters was a man who did not trust them. Draco had found the theory persuasive enough not to argue with. There were four other men in the room. None of them spoke. They sat along the wall in the postures of men who had been told before he came in not to speak. "You have something for me," Corvvis said. Draco did not at once answer. He had played this scene in his head all the way down the river wall. He had a story prepared. The story was good. It was in the way of his stories very nearly true. The best of his stories always were. He had decided on it at half 4 in the afternoon, sitting opposite Hermione Granger in the case room while she ate without noticing she was eating a sandwich Pritchard had brought her from the canteen. He told the story. He told Corvvis that the aura investigation had widened in the past fortnight, that a junior witness had come forward with information about gatherings at a country house in Hampshire, that the name attached to those gatherings was one Cyprien Burke. Cyprien Burke was a peripheral figure. Cyprien Burke was in fact a man Draco had disliked at school and had never had cause in 20 years to revise his opinion of. Cyprien Burke had also in the autumn of 96 sent a letter to Lucius Malfoy declining to host a particular gathering and the letter had survived in the family files and the letter would when produced before a Wizing panel ruin him. The story would cost Cyprien Burke his career. The story would not cost Cyprien Burke his life. Cyprien Burke had three children and a wife and a position at Gringuts. And he would, when the warrant came, surrender it without resistance because Cyprien Burke had been in all the years Draco had known him a careful and unrave. The story would also send the aura office for the next 6 to 10 weeks in a direction precisely 90 degrees away from the witness list folded in Draco's inside pocket. Corvvis listened to the story without interrupting. He listened with his hands folded on the table and his head tilted very slightly to the left in the way of a man listening to a piece of music for the second time and wishing to satisfy himself that the second hearing confirmed the first. When Draco had finished, Corvvis did not for a long moment speak. Then he said, "And the woman Draco did not at once move. The woman, Corvvis said again very lightly. Granger, she has been 3 weeks in your case room. She is, by all accounts, more capable than her predecessors. She is the reason, I take it, that you have come to us tonight with Cyprien Burke instead of with something useful. Granger, Draco said, is following the Bristol thread. The Bristol thread is dead. She does not yet know that she will. A silence. Corvvis picked up the catalus, turned it in his hands without opening it, set it down. Mr. Malfoy, I will be plain with you. The woman is a problem. The woman has been since her appointment a problem we did not anticipate. There are members of this organization who believe that she should be removed. There are others of whom I am one who believe that her removal would attract precisely the attention we have for 5 years taken pains to avoid. I am holding the second view at some cost to my standing. A pause. I would be very grateful, Mr. Malfoy, if you would give me a reason in the next four weeks to continue holding it. Draco's hand was beneath the table, very still. You will have your reason, he said. Cyprien Burke is not a reason. Cyprien Burke is a gift and not, I would say, a generous one. In a fortnight, Draco said, "I will give you better." Corvvis looked at him. The look was long. It was the look Draco had come to recognize that Corvvis used when he was deciding whether a man across his table was lying to him. Not whether the man was telling the truth, which was a question Corvis had long ago stopped asking, but whether the lie was one that could be permitted to stand. Draco kept his eyes on Corvis's. He did not in any portion of his face alter. In a fortnight, Corvvis said. In a fortnight. Very well, Mr. Malfoy. Go and write your report on Mr. Burke. We will, in the meantime, take certain precautions of our own. Do not be alarmed if the names in your case room rearrange themselves a little in the coming days. It is, you understand, prudent housekeeping. I understand. He rose. He inclined his head, the same small courtly gesture he had used at the case room door three weeks before and at the manora gates and in every room of his life since his 16th year. and he went down the stairs and out through the side door and along the river wall in the direction of West India Dock and the folded parchment in his inside pocket pressed with each step against the third rib above his heart. He did not go home. He walked. He walked from the aisle of dogs north along the lime house cut in a fine cold rain that made the gas lamps along the toe path bloom into small soft yellow flowers in the dark. He walked to mile end. He walked to Bethyl Green. He walked without intending it in the direction of Bloomsbury and at 1 in the morning he found himself standing at the corner of a square he had not meant to come to looking up at a second floor window in a terrace of cream fronted Georgian houses in which a single lamp was burning. He knew which window it was. He had walked her home once after a late raid in November and had stood at the foot of her steps and said good night and had watched without seeming to watch which window had come a light 5 minutes after the front door had shut. The lamp was burning now. She was awake then at 1:00 in the morning on a Wednesday after a 15-hour shift. She was awake in her sitting room with the lamp on and he was standing in the rain at the corner of her square and he had a folded parchment in his pocket that she had given him because he had put his hand on her wrist and he had not this evening betrayed it. He had not betrayed it. He had bought it for weeks. He had bought her four weeks at the price of Cyprien Burke's career and his own slow, patient erosion in a tannery on the aisle of dogs. And the four weeks were, by any honest accounting, the most expensive thing he had ever purchased. He stood at the corner of her square in the rain for perhaps 3 minutes. He did not cross the square. He did not climb the steps. He did not knock at her door. He turned instead, and he walked back along Great Russell Street toward his own flat, and he did not on the way lift his face once from the wet pavement, and at his own door he was sick, very quietly into the area drained beside the steps. He stood a long time afterwards with his forehead against the cold iron of the railing. Then he went up. He let himself in. He hung his coat on the hook by the door. He took the folded parchment from the inside pocket. He carried it to the writing desk under the green shaded lamp and he laid it on the desk and he sat in the leather chair opposite the desk and he looked at it. He still did not open it. He looked at it until the lamp gutted low, and then he reached out with a hand that was not this time perfectly steady. And he lifted the parchment, and he placed it unopened, untouched, the folds still pristine in the iron stove beside the desk. And he set it a light with a small, almost soundless flick of his wand. It curled. It blackened. It went. He sat in the dark of his sitting room a long time after. He had bought her 4 weeks. He had not by any portion of any measure bought himself a single hour. The warrant for Cyprien Burke was issued on a Friday. Hermione read it twice. The first time at her desk in the case room in the slow, careful manner with which she read all warrants. The second time on the train home with the carriage almost empty and the lamps of the suburbs sliding past the window in long soft yellow lines. By the second reading, she had decided that the warrant was wrong. She had not yet decided what to do about it. The wrongness of it was a feeling at first with no shape. It was the feeling she had at the end of a chess game when she had not quite lost and yet sensed the board had been arranged against her several moves before she had thought to check. Cyprien Burke, a peripheral name, a man whose letters in the file did not, when she went back through them, sit easily beside the pattern of the gatherings she had been mapping. A man, in short, who fit, and who fit, she thought, in the particular way that a piece does when someone has shaved its edges to make it sit. She did not at once accuse anyone of having shaved the edges. She went home. She sat in her sitting room with the lamp on. She drank a cup of tea. She did not in the end finish. At half midnight she rose, put on her coat, and went out into the rain. She did not apperate. She walked. She walked from her square through Bedford Square and along Great Russell Street, past the closed black gates of the museum and the small late yellow window of a public house where two men were arguing without heat about the price of fish. She walked to Bloomsbury Way. She turned right. She walked to the corner of his street, and she stood at it for a long moment in the rain, and she did not for that moment know whether she would walk the further 50 yards to his door, or whether she would turn back. The window on the second floor of his house was lit. She walked the 50 yards. She climbed his steps. She lifted the brass knocker. She did not, in the act of lifting it, give herself time to reconsider. She let it fall. She heard the sound travel up through the house. She heard a moment later a footstep on a wooden floor above. She heard the footstep descend the stair. She heard the small particular sound of a chain being slid out of its keeper and then the click of a lock and then the door opened on Draco Malfoy in his shirt sleeves with the silver ring on his left hand in plain view and his eyes the color of the wet street behind her. He did not for a moment speak. She did not either. The rain went on falling on Great Russell Street. He stepped back from the door. He did not say, "Come in." He stepped back, and the gesture was its own sentence, and she crossed the threshold, and he closed the door behind her, and slid the chain back into its keeper with a hand that was not, on this occasion, perfectly steady. His flat was as she had imagined and not. The leather chair by the unlit fire, the bookshelves, the decanter on the side table untouched, a writing desk under a green shaded lamp, the lamp lit, a small iron stove beside the desk, the door of the stove closed, a faint smell of ash in the air that had nothing to do with a fire. She noted these things without intending to note them. She had been an aura for 5 years. She could not any longer enter a room without reading it. He did not immediately offer her a chair. He stood by the writing desk with one hand resting on the back of it and the silver ring catching the lamplight and his other hand, the bare one hanging at his side. He was looking at her. He was looking at her as a man looks at the long expected envelope when it has at last arrived on his hall table without surprise, without protest, with a kind of slow, attentive resignation that was not in any sense defeat. She did not take off her coat. Cyprien Burke, she said he did not move. The warrant came down at 5, she said. Her voice was quieter than she had meant it to be. She did not raise it. Robards signed it on the strength of a witness statement filed yesterday morning at 8. The witness statement was filed by you. Yes. The witness has not been cross-deposed. No. The witness is your mother's third cousin. Yes. You knew that when you filed the statement? Yes. She drew a breath. She did not in drawing it look away from his face. Malfoy, she said, I have spent the last fortnight building a witness list. The list does not contain Cyprien Burke. The list contains seven people who fit the gathering pattern and one who does not. And the one who does not is the one a person who wished to misdirect this case would offer me. And the person who offered me Cyprien Burke is you. He did not for the space of three breaths speak. The rain went on falling on great Russell Street. The lamp on the writing desk gave its small soft oilfed light. The silver ring on his hand was very bright against the dark wood of the desk and very dull against the white of his shirt cuff. And she did not, for the space of those three breaths, take her eyes from his. He said, "Sit down, Granger. I will not sit down." Then I will stand. I do not require you to stand. I am aware. a pause. He inclined his head, a small, almost involuntary gesture, and he straightened, and he set both hands flat on the back of the leather chair, the silver rings sounding once, faintly against the brass stud at the top of the upholstery, and he looked at her across the small room with eyes she did not any longer find unreadable. "What do you want me to say?" he said very quietly. I want you to say it, she said. Whichever of the several true things it is. He drew a long, slow breath. He let it out. He did not on the breath out look away. There is a man, he said. He goes by the name Corvis. He runs what remains of the cell. I have been reporting to him for 4 years and 4 months. I was turned by Kingsley in the spring of 99 after the trial. I have been for the four years and 4 months an informant of the aura office inside the cell and an informant of the cell inside the aura office. And the line between which of those I am at any given hour has been for some time now less clear to me than it ought to have been. He paused. He did not look away. Cyprien Burke, he said, is a man I gave to Corvis on Wednesday night in a tannery on the aisle of dogs in exchange for four weeks in which Corvvis will not act against you. The witness statement I filed yesterday morning is the public face of that exchange. The names you gave me on the parchment in the case room at 2 in the morning. I did not open the parchment. I burned it in that stove there without reading it. He had not raised his voice. He had not in any portion of the speech raised his voice. She did not for a long moment answer. She crossed instead to the writing desk. She did not look at his face when she crossed. She laid her hand on the iron of the stove. The iron was cold to the touch. She opened the small door of the stove with the latch. Inside on the grate lay a clean, soft gray curl of ash, the shape of a folded square of parchment, kept whole by some courtesy of the burning, undisturbed by any draft. She closed the stove. She turned. He had not moved from the back of the chair. The space between them in the small lamplit room was perhaps 6 ft. The lamp made its soft oil-fed sound. The rain made its soft steady sound at the window. Somewhere in the flat below, a clock she had not until now registered struck the quarter past 1. She did not draw her wand. She could have. She had thought on the train home that she would. She had thought, walking through Bedford Square in the rain, that she might. She had thought on his steps with her hand on the knocker, that the wand would be the next thing she lifted after the knocker fell. She did not draw it. She put her hands instead in the pockets of her coat. She kept them there. She did not, in keeping them there, trust herself with what they would do if they were free. Malfoy, she said. Granger, if I walk out of this flat tonight, she said, and I do not go to Robards in the morning, you understand what I will have done. I understand. And if I do go to Robards in the morning, you understand what I will have done. I understand that, too. And if I sit down in that chair instead, and you make me a cup of tea, and we speak for the rest of this night, until it is light at the window, about every name you have given Corvvis, and every name Corvis has given you, and you write each one down on a clean sheet of parchment in your own hand, and you sign it. You understand what you will have done." He looked at her. He did not on this occasion incline his head. He said yes. She did not move from the writing desk. He did not move from the back of the chair. The space of six feet between them held for the length of perhaps 10 heartbeats a thing that had no name in any of the case files she had ever read. And she had read in 5 years a great number of case files. She took her hands out of her pockets. She did not with them draw her wand. She took off her coat. She laid it over the arm of the leather chair he had been standing behind. She sat down in the chair opposite the chair by the unlit fire with her back very straight and her hands folded in her lap. And she said, "Then make the tea." He did not at once move. When he did move, it was without flourish. He went to the small kitchen behind a halfopen door at the back of the sitting room. She heard the soft domestic sounds of a kettle being filled and set on a hob, of two cups being lifted from a shelf, of a small caddy being opened and closed. She did not, while he was out of the room, look at the writing desk or at the stove or at the silver ring she had seen on his hand. She looked at her own hands in her lap. She did not, while he was out of the room, take her eyes from them. He came back. He carried a tray. He set it on the low table between the two chairs. He set a cup in front of her. He sat then in the chair opposite, not the chair she had laid her coat over. He had moved a third chair from the writing desk and set it across from hers. And he placed a clean sheet of parchment on his knee, and he uncapped a small bottle of ink, and he dipped his quill, and he looked at her across the low table with his hand poised above the parchment. "From the beginning," she said. He inclined his head. He wrote. He wrote until 4. The rain went on at the window in the slow, indifferent way of rain that has decided to settle in for the rest of a night. The lamp on the low table between them burned green and steady. The kettle was set on a second time at half 2 and a third at 3, and the third cup of tea grew cold beside Hermione Granger's knee while she read the third sheet of parchment he had filled in his neat, hurried slant. There were names she had expected. There were names she had not. There were dates that fit precisely into gaps in her own timeline and dates that opened gaps she had not until now known were there. There was an address in Leon. There was a Gringot's vault number she made him repeat twice. There was the name Corvis and beneath it in smaller letters the name Augustus Selwin Carrow which was not a name she had seen in any aura file in the last 5 years and which sat on the parchment with the small lethal weight of a piece of information that had been wanted very badly by several people for a long time. He wrote with the discipline of a man giving testimony. He did not embellish. He did not, when the writing required him to set down a thing that put him in a worse light than the line before, hesitate over the line. He set it down. He moved on. He did not in any of the four hours ask her what she would do with the parchment when he had finished. At a quart 4, she said, "Stop." He set the quill in the inkwell. He did not at once look up. "I do not mean stop because I have heard enough," she said. "I mean stop because your hand is shaking." He looked then at his own hand on the parchment. The hand was shaking. It was a small fine tremor at the base of the thumb, the kind a dualist's hand learns to suppress before its owner is 20. He had not, until she said it, noticed it. He flexed the fingers once. The tremor did not stop. He laid the hand palm down flat on his knee. "I'll get water," she said. She rose. She went to the kitchen behind the halfopen door. She filled a glass of the tap. She brought it back. She did not on the way back hand it to him directly. She set it on the low table between the two chairs in the small empty space beside his cooling cup of tea because she had understood somewhere in the third hour that he did not at this moment wish to be handed things. He picked up the glass. He drank half of it. He set it down. "Thank you," he said. She sat down again opposite him. She did not, in sitting down, pick up the parchment he had been writing on. She let it lie on his knee. "Malfoy," she said. "Look at me." He looked at her. The lamp was low between them. The green shade made the light in the small room the color of pond water at evening. His face in that light was not the face she had sat across from in the case room three weeks earlier. It was thinner at the cheekbone. The skin beneath his eyes had gone a color she had only previously seen on people who had been ill for a long time without telling anyone. She did not for a moment speak. When she did, her voice was not the aura's voice. It was a voice she had not in 5 years used in any room with a case file in it. How long since you slept? She said, a pause properly, she added. He considered the question. He considered it, she thought, as a man considers a question in a language he's not spoken for some time and is having to translate word by word in his head. I don't know, he said. A guess, a long time, a year, two, longer. She did not for a moment answer. She rose. She did not in rising ask him anything, and she did not look at his face when she rose, and she crossed to the leather chair where she had laid her coat at the start of the night, and she did not put the coat on. She lifted it. She folded it over her arm. She turned. She crossed back to him. She did not again sit down opposite him. She sat down beside him on the arm of the chair he was in. The way a person sits beside a child who has been frightened in the night and does not quite yet want to be touched, but wants very much not to be alone. And she did not in sitting down put her hand on him. He did not move. The silver ring on his left hand caught the lamplight and threw it once faintly across the wall. Take it off, she said. He looked at the ring. He looked at her. He did not for a moment understand her. Then he understood her. He lifted his right hand to his left. He set the pad of his thumb beneath the band. The ring did not at first move. It had bitten into the skin beneath it for so many years that the skin had remembered the shape and the ring had to be persuaded in small careful turns to come away from the flesh. He persuaded it. He did not, in the act of persuading it, look at her, and she did not look at his hands while he worked. The ring came off. The skin beneath it was a paler ring of its own, a faint, almost translucent band, where the silver had sat unmoved for years. He set the ring on the low table beside the cooling tea and the half drunk glass of water. The ring made a small dry sound against the wood. He did not pick it up again. He looked at his own bare finger as though he had not in some time seen it. He pressed the pad of his right thumb against the pale band of skin. She did not on the arm of the chair move. She did not move when he turned his face at last toward her. She did not move when his eyes did the thing they had not in 5 years of any room they had been in done. Went in their gray briefly and completely undefended. She did not move when his hand, the bare left hand without the ring, lifted from his knee and crossed the small distance between his knee and the arm of the chair where she sat and stopped 2 in short of her own hand and waited. She put her hand under his. She did not put it on his. She put it under his palm up on the leather arm of the chair, and his bare hand, the one with the pale band of skin where the ring had been, settled into her palm with the slow, careful weight of an object that had been carried for a long way, and was at last being set down. Neither of them, for a long moment, spoke. The lamp on the low table burned green and steady. The rain went on at the window. The clock in the flat below struck at last the half 4. She did not know afterwards which of them moved first. She thought later in the months and years she had not yet on the arm of his leather chair at half 4 on a Friday morning in February any way of knowing she would have. that she had moved first, that she had been the one to shift very slightly on the arm of the chair, so that her shoulder was no longer above his shoulder, but level with it, that she had been the one to turn her face very slightly toward him, that she had been the one to lean. He thought later that he had. It did not in the end matter. What was true was that the small distance between them, which had been 6 feet at the writing desk and 3 ft at the low table and 18 in on the arm of the leather chair, became at 4 on a Friday morning in February, no distance at all. His mouth, when it found hers, was not a young man's mouth. It was not eager and it was not certain. It was the mouth of a man who had not in 5 years kissed anyone he had not been required to kiss for reasons of an assumed identity. And it moved against hers with the slow, careful disbelief of someone discovering that a thing he had not in those five years permitted himself to want was in fact in his hands. She did not draw back. She raised her free hand, the one not under his, on the arm of the chair, and set it with the same slow care against the side of his face. Her thumb passed once lightly along his cheekbone. She felt beneath her thumb the small involuntary movement of the muscle at the corner of his jaw. The tremor that had been in his hand on the parchment now relocated to his face. And she did not on feeling it lift her thumb. She kept it there. The kiss was not long. It did not need to be. When it ended, when he drew back by a fraction and rested his forehead against hers, and his eyes did not this time close, she did not move her hand from his cheek. She did not move her hand from beneath his on the arm of the chair. She did not on the arm of his leather chair at 4 in the morning move at all. He said very quietly, "Granger, Hermione, a pause. the smallest of pauses. Hermione, he said. The name in his mouth was a thing she had not until that moment heard him say. He said it the way a man says a word he has been turning in his mouth for a long time without permitting himself to use it. His breath on the second syllable was uneven. She said, "Draco." He closed his eyes on his name. They sat a long while afterwards. He did not pick the ring up from the low table. She did not let go of his hand. The parchment he had written on lay on the floor between his feet where it had slid from his knee. And the lamp on the low table burned green and low. And somewhere outside in great Russell Street, the first cart of the morning passed. a slow wooden rumble against the cobbles, a horse's hoof striking once against a loose stone. She did not for some time speak. When she did, her voice was practical. It was the voice she used in the case room. It was the voice that had three weeks earlier asked him about a kettle in Bristol. And it was now the voice that said, "At 7, I will go to Robards. I will go alone. I will take the parchment with me. I will tell him I have a witness who has agreed to give crown evidence in exchange for the protections set out in the aura's charter sections 4-9 and I will require him to bring the minister into the room before I name the witness. I will ask for an internal trial in chambers no profit. I will require Kingsley to confirm on the record that you have been an asset of the office since the spring of 99. He listened with his forehead still against hers. He did not for a moment open his eyes. They will not give me a charter, he said. I have given them corvvis on a sheet of parchment in my own hand. I have given them selwin caro. They do not after that need to give me anything. They will give you the charter, she said, because I will not put the parchment into Robart's hand until they have signed it. He opened his eyes. He looked at her. He did not in the looking say anything. He raised his free hand from beneath hers on the arm of the chair. slowly as a man raises a hand he has only recently remembered he owns and he set the pad of his thumb against the corner of her mouth and he held it there and he did not in holding it there do anything else the lamp guttered once she did not for a long moment move Kingsley signed the charter at 20 7. He signed it in his shirt sleeves at his own breakfast table with a fountain pen Hermione had handed him from the inside pocket of her coat, and he signed it after reading the document twice from end to end without speaking, and after meeting her eyes for the third time across the toast rack and the marmalade. and he signed it because the third meeting of the eyes had told him what the second had begun to suspect. That Hermione Granger had walked into his kitchen at 7 in the morning of a Friday in February with a piece of parchment in her satchel that would when produced endulous Rex. and she would not produce it until he had signed the charter, and she would, if necessary, stand in the kitchen until the end of the working day. He signed it at 20 7. She produced the parchment at 22 minutes past. The raid went in at midnight. Hermione was not on it. She had by the terms of the charter she had drafted recused herself from the operational phase. She was instead in a side room at the ministry with the parchment in front of her on a clean table and a junior cler taking down in real time the corrections she made to the cell's logistical map. As the reports came in, Roards led the raid. Pritchard went in at the back of the tannery. Yaxley Jones took the roof. A huja was on the river wall. 41 men and women of the aura office descended on three properties. The tannery on the aisle of dogs, a townhouse in Kensington, a farmhouse in Hampshire. At the same moment, by the same charm, on the strike of the same midnight, by half 1, Nulus Rex was finished. Corvvis was taken at the writing desk in the upstairs room of the tannery. He was reading when Pritchard came through the door, the same leatherbound book of Catalus, marked at the same page with the same slip of green ribbon. He set the book down. He inclined his head. He said, "Mr. Pritchard, I had wondered." He raised his hands and did not, in the raising of them, reach for his wand. Augustus Selwin Caro was taken at the farmhouse in Hampshire by a young aura called Lynn, who had three years earlier sat the qualifying exam in a hall in which Selwin Caro had been. Although no one in the hall had then known it, the man who had signed the warrants for two of Lynn's cousins. There were no casualties. The cell had been, by Draco's account, 11 men and two women. By 2 in the morning, all 13 were in the ministry's holding cells. Draco was not at the raid. He had been, by the same charter, taken into protective custody at 6 minutes 8 that morning. He had been escorted from his flat in Bloomsbury by two auras. He had himself worked alongside for four years, who had been told nothing of the charge against him, and had been instructed only that he was to be treated with courtesy and held under guard at a ministry safe house in Marilleone. And they had treated him with courtesy and held him under guard at a ministry safe house in Marilleone. And at 20 10 the same morning, Hermione had come to the safe house and sat with him in a small first floor room with a window onto a back garden and told him that the charter had been signed and that Robards had agreed to an internal hearing and that Kingsley had asked at 26 minutes 7 whether she was certain. And you said," Draco had asked her." I said, "Yes." He had not for a moment answered. She had reached across the small table in the small room and laid her hand palm up on the wood between them. He had not this time hesitated. He had set his own hand into hers, the bare one without the ring. And the pale band of skin where the ring had been, was in the morning light through the back garden window less pale than it had been in the lamplight. The skin had begun already to remember its color. She had stayed an hour. At 11, she had gone to brief the raid. The hearing was held three weeks later in a chamber on the seventh floor in the presence of the minister, the head of the aura office, two members of the wizing acting in advisory capacity, and a cler. There was no press. There was no public gallery. Hermione testified for 90 minutes. She was, by every account afterwards, extraordinary. She did not ornament. She did not in any portion of the 90 minutes raise her voice. She set the chronology of Draco's four-year position out before the chamber as a draftsman sets out a building line by line. And when she had finished, there was in the chamber a long silence, and Kingsley said, "Thank you, Aura Granger." And the senior of the two Wizing members removed her spectacles and rubbed the bridge of her nose for a long moment before she put them back on. Draco testified for 40. He answered every question put to him. He did not at any point look at Hermione. She did not at any point look at him. They had agreed this in the small first floor room in Marilleone on the third visit. The chamber was not they had agreed the room in which they would look at each other. The wizen retired at 4. They returned at 20 5. The senior member read the judgment. The judgment was long. Its essence was short. Draco Malfoy was found to have rendered over a period of 4 years and 4 months services to the aura office of a kind and at a personal cost that the chamber found difficult to weigh in any conventional currency. The chamber accepted the recommendation of the minister supported by the head of the aura office and the testimony of Aura Granger that no further sanction be imposed. His resignation from the aura office tendered the previous week was accepted. The chamber wished on the record to express its gratitude. He inclined his head to the chamber. He did not, on inclining it, speak. He walked out of the chamber at 26 minutes past 5 into a corridor in which Hermione Granger was standing at the window with her back to him, looking down at the courtyard six floors below, and he crossed the corridor to her, and he stopped a pace behind her, and he did not, for a moment, do anything else. She turned. She put her hand against the side of his face. She did not in the corridor outside the chamber at 27 minutes past 5 on a Wednesday in March kiss him. She put her hand against his cheek and she held it there and she looked at him and he looked at her and the long slow exhale that left him was the exhale of a man who had not in 5 years been certain that any room he walked out of would not turn out in the end to have been a courtroom. He covered her hand with his. he said very quietly. Hermione, she said, "Come home." The cottage was hers. She had bought it the summer after the war with a small inheritance her parents had left in a vault she had not until then known existed, and she had not in 5 years used it for more than a fortnight at a stretch. It stood on a low headland on the north coast of Cornwall, half a mile from the village of Trebbarwith in a garden that had gone in her absence comfortably to seed. The roof was slate. The walls were whitewashed. The door was painted the particular blue of a fishing boat that had been painted by a man who could not on the day be persuaded to use any other color. There was a kitchen with a flagstone floor. There was a sitting room with a fireplace that drew well. There was upstairs one bedroom under the eaves with a window that looked west. And on a clear evening, the window held the sun in its frame for a long, slow, copper colored hour before letting it go into the sea. They went down on the Friday. They did not on the first night speak very much. She lit the fire. He carried the bags upstairs. They ate at the kitchen table a meal she had brought from London in a basket. Bread, cheese, two pears, a bottle of something cold and green. And they sat afterwards on the small bench by the door and watched the last of the sun go into the water. and his hand on the bench between them found hers without ceremony, and her thumb passed once along the pale band of skin where the silver ring had been. The band was by then almost gone. The skin had remembered its color. He slept that first night. He slept the way a man sleeps who has not in some years permitted himself to. He slept on his side with one hand under his cheek and the other open on the sheet between them. And he did not wake at two or at 3 or at 4. And Hermione, who had woken at 4 for reasons of long habit, lay on her own side, and watched the line of his shoulder rise and fall in the soft gray pre-dawn light from the window under the eaves. and she did not for a long time do anything else. At a quart 5 she put her hand very lightly into his hair. He did not wake. He turned his face in his sleep a fraction toward her hand. She kept her hand there until the sun came up. There would be other mornings. There would be a morning in April when the garden, against every expectation, produced a row of daffodils he had not planted, and she had not planted, and which the previous owner of the cottage had evidently set in the soil 20 years before and forgotten. There would be a morning in May when Pritchard came down on the train to bring them news of the second tier of arrests and stayed for lunch and was kind and did not, while he was kind, mention by any indirect means the matter of the Bristol kettle. There would be a morning in July when Hermione would say very practically over the breakfast table. I think I should like to go back to the ministry in the autumn, not auras, law, the reform office. And he would look at her and incline his head and say good and pour her another cup of tea. There would be a morning 2 years on when he would slide a small box across the breakfast table without speaking and she would open it and inside it would be a ring he had had made. gold, not silver. Plain, the way she liked things plain, with a small, deliberate notch in the inside of the band, which she would not understand until he told her that evening that he had asked the goldsmith to set the notch at the exact circumference at which the old ring had bitten his own finger, so that he would never in his life forget the difference. She would put the ring on. She would not then take it off again. But on this morning, on the second morning, in the cottage on the headland above Trebarwith, with the daffodils still 6 weeks away, and the reform office still 6 months away, and the goldsmith in Hatton Gardens still 2 years away from a commission he did not yet know he would receive. On this morning, the first full morning of his first full sleep, Draco Malfoy woke at 20 7 to the sound of a kettle being set on a hop in a kitchen below, and the smell of bread being warmed in an oven, and the particular soft, distant, repeating sound of the sea on the rocks at the foot of the headland half a mile off. and he opened his eyes in a room he had not the day before ever slept in. And he lay for a moment without moving, and let the unfamiliar fact of being rested, settle into his body, the way warmth settles into a stone that has for a long time been cold. Downstairs in the kitchen, Hermione Granger was humming. She was humming under her breath, the way a person hums who does not know she is humming. And the tune was nothing in particular, and the kettle was beginning with a soft, climbing, almost human note of a copper kettle on a hot hob to come to the boil. He got up. He dressed. He went down the stair in his stocking feet because the flag stones below were cold and he had not the night before thought to bring slippers. She turned at the kitchen door when he came in. She smiled. He had in 23 years of knowing her face never seen it do exactly that thing before. He stopped in the doorway for a moment only because his body had stopped. And then he crossed the kitchen and he put his arms around her at the small of the back and she set her chin on his shoulder and the kettle behind them reached its full note and held it. She reached without looking and lifted it from the hob. She did not for a long moment pour. She stood in his arms in the kitchen with a kettle in one hand and the other hand spread flat against the back of his shoulder blade. And the morning came in through the window over the sink in the slow particular salt bright light of a clear day on the north coast of Cornwall in March. And somewhere half a mile off the sea went on with its long indifferent repeating sentence on the rocks. And neither of them for that moment said anything at all. She set the kettle down. She poured. 5 years on. The cottage on the headland had in those 5 years learned them. The blue door had been repainted twice and was this summer the color of a kingfish's back. The slate roof had lost three tiles in a January gale and gained three new ones in February. The garden, which had gone comfortably to seed in the year before they came, had been coaxed into a less comfortable but more interesting arrangement of lavender and rosemary along the south wall, of a small kitchen plot under the kitchen window, and of a single fig tree by the gate that bore against every expectation of every gardener in the village four fruits a year. The daffodils still came up where she had not planted them. It was a Saturday in late June, and the morning was the particular kind of clear that the north coast permitted itself perhaps a dozen times a summer. The sea below the headland was the color of a bottle held against a window. The gulls were quiet. The wind, which on this coast was almost never quiet, had taken the morning off and gone, presumably to bother some other county. Hermayan was at the kitchen table with the daily prophet, folded to the third page, and a cup of tea cooling beside her elbow. She was not reading the prophet. She was reading with a small contained smile of a woman who had been waiting six months for a particular paragraph of a particular act to be passed. The third page of the parliamentary supplement in which the third reading of the magical creatures protection amendment act had on Thursday evening gone through the wizing by a margin of 11 votes. She had drafted the amendment. She had drafted in the last three years of the reform office four like it. Draco came in from the garden in his shirt sleeves with earth on his hands and a single fig ripe soft as a held breath in the cup of his right palm. He set the fig on the table beside her tea without speaking. He went to the sink. He washed the earth from his hands with the small methodical care he brought to all domestic operations. And he dried them on the linen towel that hung by the window. And he came back to the table and stood behind her chair and read over her shoulder the paragraph she was reading. He said, "11 votes." 11. How many did you think you would get? Seven. He set his hands on her shoulders. He bent his head and pressed his mouth briefly against the place where her neck met her hair. He did not say anything. He did not need to. She lifted her left hand from the table and set it over his right on her shoulder and the gold ring on her third finger, the one with a small deliberate notch on the inside of the band set at the exact circumference at which the old silver had bitten his finger, caught the morning light from the window, and threw it once briefly across the wall. Pritchard came at noon. He brought his wife Anna who was a healer at St. Mongo's and his two small daughters who were three and five and who had in the year since their last visit learned to run very fast and to stop very suddenly and to require at all moments an adult within sprinting distance. The younger one made straight for the fig tree which she had been told about and which she had been planning since April to climb. Draco caught her around the waist as she went past and lifted her upside down and laughing before she reached the lowest branch and set her right way up on the kitchen step with the grave instruction that the figs were on this particular Saturday off limits and that she was instead in charge of feeding the hens. There were six hens. The hens had been Pritchard's gift the previous summer as a housewarming present three years late. They were called against Hermione's mild and losing protest after the six founders of the Whizing Reform Subcommittee and the lead hen, a russet bird with strong views, was called Griselda. The younger daughter, who was three, went to feed Griselda with the dignified seriousness of a small ambassador on a difficult mission. They ate in the garden. The table had been carried out from the kitchen and set under the fig tree, which threw a soft, dappled, leafedged shade across the cloth. There was bread and cold chicken and a salad Hermione had made from the kitchen plot and a bottle of something pale and dry that Anna had brought from a vineyard in the Lir where she had spent a fortnight that spring. There was in the center of the table a small pottery jug of lavender because the lavender along the south wall was at its peak and because Draco that morning before breakfast had cut a handful and put it in water without remarking on the cutting or the water and had set the jug on the table where she would see it when she came down. Pritchard partway through the chicken said, "I keep meaning to ask. Did Robards ever write?" Draco said he wrote in March. "Did you answer?" I did. And he's well. He retires at Christmas. He has, he tells me, taken up the cultivation of orchids. Pritchard considered this. Orchids? Yes. Roards? Yes. Pritchard shook his head slowly in the manner of a man absorbing a piece of news that contradicted his understanding of the natural order and reached for the wine. The two daughters fell asleep on a rug under the fig tree at 3. The four adults sat on at the table. The afternoon went on in the slow, particular way of afternoons in June on the north coast of Cornwall, in which the light did not for several hours perceptibly change, and the sea below the headland continued its long indifferent sentence on the rocks, and the lavender released its scent into the warm air in slow, considered waves. Anna, who knew Hermione well by now, asked without preamble whether the department was treating her properly. Hermione said it was. Ana said more quietly. And the other thing, Hermione looked at her over the rim of her glass. We are still considering it, she said. We are considering it carefully. Anna did not press. She rarely did. Across the table, Draco was telling Pritchard about a problem with the well pump, which had taken to making a noise in the mornings that he did not, as a city boy, recognize. Pritchard, who had grown up in Gway, knew the noise. The noise meant a particular small valve had perished. Pritchard would send a man. The conversation moved on. Hermione watched her husband across the table. She had been doing this on and off for 5 years, and she had not yet stopped finding it interesting. She watched the way he listened to Pritchard with his head tilted very slightly to the right, the way he laughed properly with his shoulders in a way he had not laughed at all in the first year. at a joke about a Galway plumber. She watched the way the late afternoon sun coming in low under the fig leaves made the line of his jaw clean and the small lines at the corner of his eye visible. She watched him reach without looking for her hand under the table. She gave him her hand. His thumb passed once lightly across her knuckle and the gold ring and the small notch on the inside of the band that no one would ever see but the two of them. The Pritchards left at 7. The girls were carried asleep to the apparition point at the foot of the lane. Anna kissed Hermione's cheek, and Pritchard gravely shook Draco's hand, and the four of them stood for a moment in the soft, salt bright evening light at the foot of the lane, while the gulls began at last to wake and to make their long, drifting downward cries above the headland. And then the Pritchards were gone with a small clean snap of an apparition that left for a heartbeat the smell of warm grass and dust in the air. Hermione and Draco walked back up the lane to the cottage hand in hand. They sat on the bench by the door as they had on the first night and watched the sun go into the sea. It went slowly that evening. The sky west of the headland passed through every color a sky was permitted in June on the north coast of Cornwall to attempt through gold and copper and a deep slow rose and a final long minute of something almost green at the horizon where the last of the sun went out of sight. and Hermione against the warm wood of the bench leaned her head onto Draco's shoulder and Draco set his cheek against the crown of her head and neither of them for the length of the color changing said anything. When the sun was gone, he said very quietly, "I was thinking about a name." She did not for a moment move. "Were you?" She said, "I was. Tell me. He did not tell her at once. He turned his head a fraction so that his mouth was at her temple. He said the name into her hair. It was a short name. It was a kind name. It was a name that did not belong to anyone in either of their families, living or dead. A name chosen, she understood, at once, precisely for that reason, because it was a name that would not require their child to carry on her shoulders any house but her own. She did not, for a moment, speak. She lifted her face. She looked at him in the last of the light. She said, "Yes." He closed his eyes on her. Yes, the way he had closed them 5 years before on his own name in her mouth. And she put her hand against the side of his face and held it there. And the sea went on half a mile below the headland with its long, slow, repeating sentence on the rocks. And somewhere in the dim of the kitchen behind them, a clock she had brought down from London two summers before struck at last. They ate. He opened his eyes. He kissed her. The kiss was not the kiss of 5 years before in the lamplight of a flat in Bloomsbury at 4 in the morning. It was a different kiss. It was the kiss of a man who had in those five years learned what it was to be loved without a mask, and had learned it slowly, and had learned it well, and who was kissing his wife on a bench by a blue door on a headland above the sea on a clear evening in late June, with a name said into her hair and a yes in his mouth, and the small, sweet of a future neither of them had on this morning been certain they would have. She kissed him back. The lamp in the kitchen behind them, set by some courtesy of the cottage to come on at dusk, came on. Its light fell soft and yellow through the open door and across the flag stones and down the two steps and onto the bench where they sat and lit on her left hand against his cheek. The small bright circle of the gold ring with the notch he had set on the inside of the band and the pale band on his own left hand where the silver had once been was gone now entirely. The skin had at last forgotten the shape of it. It had taken 5 years. It had been worth, by every honest accounting either of them would ever do, every hour. So that was their story. Thank you for staying with me to the end. I know it was a long one. I want to tell you why I wrote this story. I have always been interested in people who live two lives, not spies in films, real people, people who smile at work and cry at home. People who say one thing and feel another. We all do this a little. I think Draco just did it more than most. When I started writing, I did not know if I could make you love him. He has done bad things he has hurt her years ago in a room in his own house. I did not want to forget that. I did not want her to forget it either. So I made them them walk past that room together. I made them not speak. Sometimes silence says more than a long apology. The hardest part to write was the kiss. Not because it was difficult to imagine because I wanted it to feel earned. I did not want it to be a fairy tale kiss. I wanted it to be the keys of two tired people who had been carrying too much for too long and who for one moment set it down. Hermione was brave in this story, but not in the way people usually mean. She was not brave with a wand. She was brave with her attention. She looked at him. She kept looking. She did not look away when it would have been easier to look away. That to me is a real love story. Thank you for listening. Take care of yourself until the next