One Reason to Hate, One to Love | Dramione (Harry Potter) Fanfiction

She had decided long ago what he was. Two years after the war, she read his name in a muggle newspaper, and the page trembled in her hand. One reason to hate, one to love, the same man. We begin the story now. The rain over London that October morning was not the dramatic kind. It was the patient sort, the sort that had been falling since before dawn, and intended to keep falling long after the city gave up trying to dry itself. It came down in fine gray needles, hissing against the pavement, beading on the wool of Hermione Granger's coat, gathering in the brim of the umbrella. She had stopped bothering to angle properly. Her shoes were already lost causes. Her hair, despite the charm she had layered over it before leaving the flat, was beginning to curl at the temples in damp, defiant coils. She turned the corner onto Marchment Street and pushed open the door of the small coffee shop, wedged between a bookbinders and a shuttered tor. The bell above the door gave a tired chime. Warm air met her, smelling of scorched milk and cardamom and the wet wool of other people's coats. She unbuttoned the top of her own and breathed in. The ministry briefing was at 9. She had 22 minutes. She ordered without looking up from the chalkboard. black coffee, no sugar, the way she had drunk it since the war, since sweet things had begun to taste like a memory she did not want, and stood off to the side by the window, while the barista did something elaborate with steam. The glass was fogged. Outside, a woman in a yellow Macintosh walked a small dog past the door and did not look in. On the narrow shelf beneath the window, someone had left a folded newspaper, a muggle paper. The Guardian by the mast head, the front page already softened by the damp from someone's gloved hands. Hermione, who had developed in the years since the war, a particular habit of reading whatever was nearest to her hands rather than letting her mind wander, picked it up. She flipped past the politics, past the weather, past a column about a chef in Burough Market who had begun fermenting his own vinegars. On page three, she stopped. The photograph was not large. It sat in the lower left corner, perhaps 3 in wide, grainy, the way muggle press photographs sometimes were when they had been taken with whatever camera happened to be present by whatever bystander had thought to lift it. The image showed a stretcher being lifted into the back of an ambulance. The figure on the stretcher was turned half away from the lens. A man, long, lean, dark coat soaked through to the lining. One arm flung outward, fingers slack. His face was not visible, only the jaw, the line of it, and a strand of pale hair plastered wet against his temple. The headline above the photograph read, "Stranger pulls child from Van's path in Russell Square." She read the first paragraph without registering anything. Read it again. By the third reading, the words had begun to assemble themselves into meaning, and her thumb, of its own accord, had pressed hard enough against the edge of the paper to crease it. The 7-year-old, who has not been named, escaped without injury, the article said. Eyewitnesses report the boy had stepped into the road after a dropped ball and did not see the oncoming delivery vehicle. A passer by described by witnesses as a tall man in a long dark coat moved into the road and pushed the child clear of the van's trajectory, taking the impact himself. The bara called her name. She did not hear it. The man was treated at the scene and transferred to University College Hospital. A spokesperson confirms he is in stable condition with a fractured left tibia and three broken ribs. He has been identified as Mr. Draco El Malfoy, 20 years old of Bloomsbury. The bell over the door chimed. Someone came in. Someone else went out. Hermione did not move. She read the paragraph a fourth time. The name did not change. The middle initial did not change. The age did not change. 20. They were both 20. She had forgotten that. She had not thought about him for long enough to forget that. The coffee, when it was put into her hand, was already cooling. She held it without drinking. The paper, still open to page three, hung from her other hand at her side. The photograph was facing her thigh now, the wet plaster of his hair against his temple turned away from her sight. She could not have explained why, but she felt that if she looked at the picture again, something in her chest was going to crack along a fault line she had spent 2 years pretending was not there. She made herself look a long arm, a loose hand, a jaw she would have known in any photograph on any street in any light. The way the bones sat under the skin, the set of the mouth, even slack, even half turned. There were not many faces she had spent more time staring at across a classroom. There were not many faces she had spent more time hating. Outside, the rain continued without urgency. She paid for the coffee she had not drunk. She folded the paper and tucked it under her arm. She walked out of the shop and she walked past the ministry visitors entrance and she walked past the alley where she ordinarily apperated. and she kept walking because her body had decided something before her mind had finished arguing about it. People died because of him. This was the sentence that arrived first, fully formed, the way a spell arrived when there was no time to think. People died because of him. He let them in. He stood at the top of that tower and he lowered his wand and he let them in. And Bill Weasley still has scars across his face. And Lavender Brown is buried in a churchyard in Devon. And the man who killed her did it because Draco Malfoy unlocked a door. She walked. The rain found the gap between her collar and her scarf. And so what? The sentence continued. The same voice harder now. And so what if he stepped into a road for a child? So what? Brave men do brave things. Cowards occasionally do brave things. It does not undo. It does not unbury. It does not unscar. She passed a post box. She did not see it. A child, said another voice, quieter, the one she did not want to hear. A child he did not know. A muggle child. A child whose name he still does not know. She stopped walking. She was standing, she realized, in the middle of a small square she did not remember entering. A church on one side, brick the color of old tea, a bench under a plain tree, its leaves yellowing, the wet of them gone almost copper in the rain. She sat down on the bench without deciding to. She opened the paper again. She read the article from the beginning. All of it this time. The witness who had said he didn't even hesitate. He just went. The driver of the van weeping into a handkerchief saying he had not seen the boy. He had not seen anything until the man was already in the road. the mother of the child, who had been across the square buying flowers, who had turned at the sound and seen a stranger lifting her son out of the path of a vehicle that had not yet stopped. He didn't even hesitate. Hermione closed her eyes. She saw the seventh floor of the castle. She saw the astronomy tower from below, the green light against the stones. She saw Lavender Brown's hand, palm up on the marble of the staircase, fingers slightly curled, as if she had been reaching for something. She had been 17. They had all been 17. She saw against her will a different image. A boy of 16 with his back against a wall and his wand wavering in his hand and his face the color of bone. A boy who had not in the end brought the wand down. A boy who had been weeping when Dumbledore offered him a way out and who had not been able in that single moment of his life to take it. She did not want to think about that boy. She had spent two years not thinking about that boy. She had decided in the months after the trials that the boy on the tower was a fiction she had constructed to make the rest of it bearable, and that the real Draco Malfoy was the one in the corridors before the war, the snear, the slur, the laughter at her expense. The other one, the trembling one, had been a trick of the light, but the man in the photograph had not hesitated. The rain ran along the brim of her hat and dripped onto the paper, blurring the ink at the edge of the column. She thought with a clarity that frightened her. He is doing now what he could not do then. The thought arrived without permission. It arrived fully formed, the way the worst thoughts do, the ones that have been assembling themselves in the dark of one's mind for months without one's noticing. He was doing now what he could not do then. He was stepping into the road. He was lowering his shoulder against a moving vehicle. He was breaking his bones for a stranger because he had not when it mattered broken anything of his own for the people he should have protected. She did not want this thought. She did not want it because it was generous and she had not given herself permission to be generous about him. She did not want it because if it was true, if he was doing now what he could not do then, then the question of what he was became more complicated than she had allowed it to be for 2 years, and she had built a great deal on that simplicity. She had built her piece on it. She folded the paper. She folded it again. She tucked it inside her coat against the lining where the ink would surely bleed onto the wool and ruin it. She did not care. She looked up. The rain was easing only slightly. The plain tree above her shed a fat drop onto the back of her hand, and she watched it slide down her knuckle and fall into the dark of her sleeve. University College Hospital, Bloomsbury, 12 minutes walk from where she was sitting. She stood up. She did not, she told herself, intend to go there. She intended to walk back to the ministry. She was already 40 minutes late for the briefing. Kingsley would be furious in his particular quiet way, the way that involved a single raised eyebrow and a memo by the end of the day. And she had a reparations draft to defend and a witness statement to file and a meeting with the goblin liaison at 11 that could not be moved. And there was no version of this morning in which she went to a muggle hospital to look at a man she had decided two years ago was beyond the reach of her sympathy. She turned left out of the square. The hospital was 12 minutes walk to the north. She walked north. She did not go in. She walked the length of the hospital's facade twice. The long pale frontage on Houston Road, the glass doors sliding open and closed for other people. For a man with a bouquet wrapped in cellophane, for a woman pushing a wheelchair, for a porter in green scrubs who lit a cigarette the moment he was outside and drew on it like a man surfacing from underwater. Hermione walked past them all. The third time she reached the corner, she turned and crossed the road and stood beneath the awning of a chemist's shop opposite, and she watched the doors of the hospital from there, as though distance might make the question easier. It did not make the question easier. She went home. She did not tell anyone where she had been. She told Kingsley by memo that she had been unwell. He sent back a single line. Take the day, Granger. And she sat at her kitchen table in her damp coat until the light failed and the rain began again, and she had still not removed the newspaper from inside her coat. She did not go to the hospital the next day either, though she walked past the building on her lunch hour and stood for 11 minutes on the pavement opposite, watching the revolving door. On the third day, she crossed the road. She told herself as she stepped into the lobby that she was not going to see him. She was going to confirm that he existed. that the photograph had not been a fabrication of her own grief fogged mind, that the article had not been some elaborate piece of journalism gone wrong, some confusion of names, some other Malfoy, though there were no other Malfoys, of course, not anymore, not in the way that mattered. She was going to the reception desk to ask, in the most neutral voice she could manage, whether a patient of that name was admitted to the ward. She was going to nod once at whatever the receptionist told her. She was going to leave. The lobby smelled of disinfectant and the faint suite of bouquets going past their last day. The floor was the color of wet stone. A child sat on a row of orange plastic chairs, swinging her legs, kicking the heel of one trainer against the metal leg of the seat in a slow, rhythmic clang that no one was correcting. Hermayan stood in the queue for the reception desk and rehearsed the sentence in her head and then when she was three places from the front stepped sideways out of the queue and walked toward the lifts. She did not know the ward number. She did not know the floor. She walked toward the lifts because to stand still was unbearable and because her legs had stopped consulting her about what they intended to do. A doctor passed her, white coat open over a striped shirt, a stethoscope looped around his neck like a casual scarf. He glanced at her without curiosity. She must have looked, she thought, like a relative, like someone who knew where she was going. People did not stop you in hospitals if you looked as though you knew where you were going. On the second floor, she stepped out of the lift and stood in a corridor that smelled faintly of lemon cleaner and machine warmth. A trolley rattled past her, pushed by an orderly humming under his breath. A door on her left was open. Through it, she could see the foot of a bed and a thin pale blanket and a chart hanging on a hook. She walked. She did not know what she was looking for. She did not look at the names on the doors. She walked the length of the corridor slowly, the way one walks through a museum on the first day after a long absence. And at the corner of the corridor she turned right, because the corridor turned right, and at the next open door she happened, she would always insist to herself it had happened to look in. He was asleep. She knew it was him before her mind named him. She knew it from the shape under the blanket, the long line of him too long for the bed, the foot in its plaster cast propped on a folded pillow. She knew it from the hair, the wet of it gone now, fine and dry, and a shade paler than she remembered. She knew it from the hand resting on the cover. The fingers were bandaged at two of the knuckles. The signate ring he had worn at school was not on his hand. There was a thin white scar across the back of the wrist that had not been there when she had last seen him in the courtroom. She stepped into the doorway. She did not step over the threshold. The room held one bed, one chair, one narrow window through which a slice of gray London sky was visible. A monitor beside the bed beeped in slow, regular intervals. A jug of water sat on the bedside cabinet beside an unopened paperback book. A book of poetry, she noted, and her eyes caught and held on the title before she could stop them. And then she made herself look away because the title felt suddenly like an intimacy she had not asked permission to witness. His face in sleep was not the face she remembered from the courtroom. The hardness around the mouth was gone. The sneer that had lived at the corner of his lip through six years of her life was simply absent, as though it had never been a feature of his bones, but only a thing he had laid over himself. And now asleep, he had let it slip. His eyelashes were paler than his hair. There was a faint bruise along his cheekbone, yellowed at the edge, the kind that had been blooming for several days. He was so thin. That was the thing she had not expected. He had always been thin in the way that boys of his upbringing were thin, narrow, kept, the sleek thinness of someone who had never wanted for a meal. and considered eating a matter of taste rather than need. This was a different thinness. This was the thinness of someone who had stopped paying attention. His wrist on the blanket was the wrist of a man who was forgetting to take care of his body. And someone, a nurse presumably a muggle nurse who did not know whose wrist she was tending, had begun the work of taking care of it for him. Something in Hermione's chest contracted, very small, very precise, and she pressed her hand flat against the doorframe to steady herself. She did not enter. She did not speak. She did not, as part of her had imagined she might, sit down in the chair beside the bed and watch him for as long as it took her to know what she felt. She stood in the doorway for perhaps 30 seconds, perhaps a minute, long enough to count three of the monitors beeps, and to register the rise and fall of the blanket over his ribs, and to notice that one corner of his mouth was turned in sleep, in something that might have been the ghost of a frown, or might have been nothing at all. Then she stepped back into the corridor. She did not run. She did not hurry. She walked back along the corridor she had come from, past the trolley, past the open doors, past a young woman crying quietly into a paper cup of tea. And she rode the lift back down to the lobby. And she crossed the lobby without looking at the reception desk. and she pushed through the revolving door and out onto Houston Road. And only then, on the pavement, with the traffic loud on her left and a bus exhaling its hot breath into her face, did she lean back against the cold brick of the hospital wall and close her eyes. He had not woken. He had not known she had been there. He would not know. She had not forgiven him. She wanted to be very clear with herself about this. She had not forgiven him. Standing in a doorway and looking at a sleeping man was not forgiveness. Noticing that his wrist was too thin was not absolution. The dead was still dead. Lavender was still in the churchyard in Devon. Bill Weasley still bore his scars. Whatever Draco Malfoy had done in a London road for a child whose name he did not know had not undone any of these things, and Hermione Granger was not the kind of woman who confused gestures with restitution. But the word arrived without invitation, but she stood on the pavement and let the word arrive. But he had been so thin under the blanket, but the sneer was gone from his sleeping mouth, but there had been no flowers in the room. There had been no card. The chair beside the bed had not been moved. No one was sitting with him. No one had brought him anything. He had stepped into the road for a child, and the child's mother had presumably been told his name by now, and she had not, it seemed, come to thank him. Or she had come, and she had not stayed, or she had come and stayed an hour and left, and that had been the only chair warmth the room had known. He was alone. This thought, more than the photograph, more than the article, more than the look of him asleep, was the thing that opened the small fisher in her she had been guarding for 2 years. He was alone in a muggle hospital, and no one was coming. His mother, she did not know where his mother was. His father was in Aszkaban. The boys he had moved through Hogwarts with had scattered. the ones who had survived and were not the sort she suspected to sit in hospital chairs. There was no one. He had stepped into a road for a stranger and now he was lying alone in a room with a paperback he could not yet sit up to read, and the monitor was beeping. And somewhere in London, she, Hermione Granger, was standing against a wall with her eyes shut, refusing to be the person who came back upstairs. She did not go back upstairs. She walked instead to the ministry. She filed her witness statement. She defended her reparations draft. She sat through the goblin liazison and took notes that she would later in her flat find she had not actually written. The page would be a series of looping spirals like the way one drew when one was thinking about something else. She went home. She heated a tin of soup and did not eat it. She sat on the floor in front of her cold fireplace and pulled the newspaper out from inside her coat where it had been all day. And she unfolded it and read the article one more time. And then she folded it back up and put it in the drawer of her writing desk beneath the unanswered letters, and she shut the drawer. She did not go to the hospital again. She walked past it once on her way to a meeting in Camden the following week. The window of his room, she had calculated, would be on the side, away from the road. She did not look up to see if a light was on. She kept walking. She told herself with a dry, ruthless practicality that had kept her alive through worse things that she had done what she needed to do. She had confirmed. He existed. He had survived. There was nothing further required of her and there was certainly nothing further she required of him. She told herself this for six weeks. She almost believed it. And then on a Tuesday afternoon in late November, in a bookshop in Bloomsbury that she had been visiting once a fortnight for nearly a year, she reached up to the top shelf for a volume of poetry she had been meaning to buy, and a hand on a crutch came into her peripheral vision, and a quiet voice she had not heard in two years said, "Very low, very even. Excuse me. I think we're after the same book. Her hand did not finish closing around the spine of the book. It stayed where it was, mid-reache, the fingers extended, the cuff of her coat falling back from her wrist by an inch. She did not turn. She heard him breathe in shallowly, the way a man breathed when his ribs had not yet entirely forgiven him. and she heard the soft rubber tip of a crutch ease itself onto the floorboards beside her right boot. The shop smelled, as it always smelled, of old paper and beeswax, and the faint cold of a draft that came down the chimney of the unlit fireplace at the back. The bell over the door had stopped chiming several seconds ago. She had not heard it. He must have been inside already when she came in. She turned her head. He was standing perhaps 18 in from her elbow. He had not, she noticed at once, fully recovered. The crutch under his left arm was taking real weight. The cast on his leg was gone, replaced by a brace she could see at the ankle where his trouser cuff had ridden up, and the leg itself was being kept slightly off the floor, the toe of the shoe brushing the boards rather than pressing into them. His coat was dark, well cut, but not new. The wool had the soft nap of a garment that had been worn through more than one winter. He was paler than he had been even in the hospital bed. The bruise on his cheekbone was gone. In its place was nothing, only the bone. She did not speak. She could not in the first instant locate the shape of any sentence she might say. He did not press. He had said his sentence, the small ordinary sentence about the book, and he was waiting now with what she recognized as the patience of a man who had spent 2 years learning not to take up more space than he had been granted. His eyes, she had forgotten the exact gray of them, or perhaps had never let herself remember, were not meeting hers directly. They were resting on the shelf, on the gap her uplifted hand had been about to fill, as though by not looking at her face, he could make the moment slightly less of an intrusion on whatever afternoon she'd been planning to have. She lowered her hand. She let it close at her side. "Which one?" she said and was surprised by the steadiness of her own voice. It was not warm. It was not cold. It was the voice she used in court when she was reading a clause aloud for the record. Which book? The bishop, he said very quietly. The collected, the dark green one, second shelf from the top. She looked up at the shelf. There were three volumes that fit the description. He must have seen her eyes move because he added almost under his breath on the left. Her hand went up again. She drew the volume down. It was heavier than she had expected. Elizabeth Bishop, complete poems, dark green cloth, the title in faded guilt along the spine, the corners just beginning to bump from age. She held it for a moment in both hands. She did not pass it to him. There's another copy, she said. Where? Bottom shelf. I saw it when I came in. Same edition. Slightly better condition. He glanced down, then back at the book in her hands. He did not move toward the bottom shelf. The crutch shifted half an inch under his arm. You were reaching for this one. I was. then you should have it." She looked at him properly for the first time. His eyes met hers and did not slide away. There was nothing in them she could immediately name. Not the old contempt, not pleading, not even the careful neutrality of strangers in a shop. It was a kind of attentiveness, very still, as though he were watching her from a long way off, and had decided not to come any closer unless invited. She held the book out to him. He did not reach for it at once. The crutch was on his left side. To take the book, he would have to free his right hand, which was currently resting on the brass railing that ran along the front of the shelf, holding him steady. He looked at the book. He looked at his own hand on the railing. Some calculation passed across his face. Not embarrassment exactly, something more practical. the arithmetic of a body that had stopped doing what it used to do without thinking. She took a step closer before she had decided to and set the book gently on the small wheeled trolley that the shop kept at the end of the aisle for customers building stacks. There, she said, it's not in either of our hands now. You can pick it up when you're ready. A muscle moved at the corner of his mouth. It was not quite a smile. It was the place a smile would have been 2 years ago in a different life on a different face. "Thank you," he said. She nodded. She turned fully to face him. She did not move closer. The distance between them was perhaps 2 ft. The aisle was narrow. A woman in a red beret edged past them with a murmured, "Sorry." And they both shifted a half step to let her through. And when the woman was gone, the space had somehow grown smaller rather than larger. "You're walking," Hermione said after a fashion. "How long since the She stopped herself." She did not want to say accident. It had not been an accident. He had stepped into the road. She did not want to say incident either because that was the word she used in reports and she did not want to use it on him. She let the sentence fall away. He understood. He always had been quick at understanding things one had not finished saying. "7 weeks tomorrow," he said. "The legs slower than they thought. The ribs were the easier of the two in the end. The ribs, she said, and her own voice surprised her by being almost ordinary. Were three. His eyes sharpened very slightly. Yes. I read the article. Ah. There was a small silence. Outside the shop, a bus went past with a sigh of breaks. The book seller behind his desk at the far end of the room turned a page of his own book without looking up. There were perhaps four other customers in the shop, none of them within 10 ft. I imagine a great many people read the article," Draco said after a moment. The tone was not bitter. It was nearly conversational. It ran for a week. I'm told the male tried to find a former classmate willing to give a quote. I'm told no one obliged. No one. No one they could find in muggle London on short notice. Ah, she said, and the syllable came out drier than she had meant. He looked at her then, the full look. She felt it the way one felt the air change before a storm. Not a thing one saw so much as a small shift of pressure inside the chest. Granger, he said the first time he had used her name. He said it without inflection, as one might say a word in a language one was learning to pronounce correctly. I am not going to ask you what you're doing here. I assume you come here. You have the look of someone who comes here. I came in because I have been coming in once a week since they let me out of hospital and the man behind the desk holds books for me. I would not have come in if I had known. I'm I'm sorry to have don't. The word came out faster than she had meant. She watched his face go still. Don't apologize for being in a bookshop," she said more quietly. "I find I cannot bear it." He inclined his head very slightly. He did not finish the sentence he had been about to finish. He did not press. The hand on the brass railing relaxed, and his weight settled more firmly on the crutch, and he was, she realized, taking a great deal of care not to occupy any more of the aisle than his body strictly required. "Was it your book," she said, because the silence had begun to want filling that you came for the bishop? "Yes, you read poetry." I have come to recently. Recently? She looked at him. She did not ask the question that wanted asking, which was why, because the answer to that question would unmake the careful composure of the afternoon, and she did not yet know what she would put in its place. Instead, she said, "She is very good, Bishop. She is. Hermione paused, trying to find the right word and finding instead the wrong one, the truer one. She is patient with grief. She does not hurry it. No, he said, she doesn't. He had read it then. He was not pretending. He had read enough of it to know. They stood there for another moment. The dust in the air moved in the slant of light from the front window. From somewhere upstairs in the shop, a clock struck the quarter hour. A single soft chime. I will let you have the book, he said finally. He keeps another. He will order it for me. It's the same addition. It is. He's reliable about these things. All right, she said. He shifted his weight. He reached with a hand that had been on the railing into the inside pocket of his coat and he withdrew a small flat card and held it out to her. It was a calling card. Cream stock, plain surf, no crest, no flourish, just a name and an address in Bloomsbury and a telephone number, which was the most surprising thing about it. in case," he said. She took the card. It was warm from the inside of his coat. The edge of it touched her thumb, and her thumb registered the warmth before her mind did. "In case of what," she said. In case there is ever anything, anything you wish to say to me, I do not assume there will be. I am not asking you to. I only there was a moment once when I would have given a great deal to know how to reach you and I did not and I he stopped. He had been about to say something else. She watched him decide with visible deliberation not to say it. "All right," she said again. Her voice was very low. She tucked the card into the inside pocket of her own coat. He nodded once and turned slowly on the crutch. He was halfway to the end of the aisle before she found her voice again. Malfoy. He stopped. He did not turn around at once. He held very still in the way of a man who has been called by his name in a tone he is not certain how to interpret and is granting the speaker the courtesy of one further breath in which to decide what came next. The child, she said, the boy in the road. Do you know his name now? A pause, a long one. Yes, he said. Will you tell me? He turned his head, not his whole body, only the head, so that he was looking at her over his shoulder, his face half in the light from the window and half in the soft dim of the aisle. "Thomas," he said. His name is Thomas. Then he turned back and he walked with the patient, slow rhythm of the crutch the rest of the way to the front of the shop, where the book seller looked up at last and nodded at him, and Draco Malfoy stepped out into the November afternoon without looking back, and the bell over the door gave its small worn chime, and Hermione Granger stood alone in the aisle with a dark green book of Elizabeth Bishop's poems on the trolley beside her and a calling card warming against her ribs the inside of her coat. She did not write to him for 9 days. This was not, she told herself, a question of indecision. It was a question of correctness. There was a right form for a letter of this kind, and she did not yet know what it was. She had drafted by the end of the first evening three openings on three separate sheets of writing paper, and she had burned all three in the small grate of her flat with a flick of her wand, and watched the ash curl up the flu. and she had told herself that she was being prudent and not cowardly, and the distinction had held more or less until the second evening. On the second evening, she wrote the whole letter through. It came out of her in one sitting at the kitchen table in green ink because the green ink was what was nearest. And she did not pause to choose her words because choosing her words was the thing that had stopped her on the first night. And she had decided today that she would not stop. She wrote four sides. She wrote about lavender by name. She wrote about the astronomy tower in detail she had not permitted herself to articulate aloud since the war. She wrote about the dead. And she wrote about Bill Weasley's face. And she wrote that she had read the article twice in the coffee shop and a third time on a bench under a plain tree. and that she had walked past the hospital three times before she went in, and that she had stood in his doorway and watched him sleep for a minute, that felt like a great deal longer, and that he had been too thin, and that she was angry about how thin he had been, although she could not, for the life of her explain to him or to herself why. She wrote, "I do not forgive you." She wrote, "I do not know what I think of you. I have not known for two years. I had decided not to think of you at all, which is its own form of knowing, I suppose. And yours is the only name I have given that treatment to." She wrote, "I want you to tell me why you stepped into the road." She wrote, "I want you to tell me why you opened the door." She wrote, "Do not answer either of these questions if your answer is going to be a clever one. I will not bear cleverness from you on this subject. I would rather you said nothing." She signed it. She blotted it. She folded it into the envelope. She wrote his name on the front and the address from the calling card beneath it. She walked across the room to the door of her flat with the envelope in her hand. She stopped at the door. She stood there for perhaps a minute and a half. Then she walked back across the room and laid the envelope in the drawer of her writing desk on top of the unanswered letters on top of the folded newspaper and she shut the drawer and she went to bed. It stayed in the drawer. On the seventh day his letter came. It came by the ordinary morning post through the slot in her front door, dropping onto the mat with the gas bill and a ministry circular about flu network maintenance. She knew it before she picked it up. The handwriting on the envelope was a hand she had seen on essays passed forward through rows of desks for six years. It had changed. It had got smaller, more contained, the loops of the letters tighter, as though the writer had been trying to take up less of the page. But it was unmistakably his. She did not open it at the door. She took it into the kitchen and set it on the table and sat down in front of it and looked at it for a long moment. The way one might look at a sealed envelope from a solicitor with the fornowledge that whatever was inside could not be unread once it had been read. She made tea. She drank half of it. She slit the envelope with her wand. It was a single sheet. The paper was good, heavy, faintly riged, the cream of old ivory. The handwriting filled rather less than half of it. Granger, thank you for the book. I did not realize when I gave you my card that I had also given myself a small daily exercise in not waiting for the post. I have been mostly successful. I tell you this not as a complaint but because I have decided in the matter of you to stop performing equinimity. I do not feel it is one of the things I have stopped doing. There are others I will not write you the letter I would like to write you. You did not ask me to write it and I have learned that letters from me on the subject of myself are an imposition. Even this one is an imposition. I am aware. I will say only there is a poem in the bishop. One art. You will know it. I had read it perhaps 30 times before the road in Russell Square. I had been trying to learn what it was teaching. I do not think I have learned it yet. But I thought of it afterwards in the hospital. the line about how the art of losing is not hard to master. I have a slightly different view. I think the art of losing is not the hard part. I think the hard part is what one does on the other side of it. I am sorry I startled you in the shop. I will be more careful in future about the places I am seen. D. She read it once, she read it twice. On the second, reading her hand, which had been holding the corner of the page lightly, was holding it tightly enough that the paper had crumpled along the edge between her thumb and forefinger. He had apologized for nothing. He had explained nothing. He had not. And this was the thing that undid her. He had not begged. He had not constructed a defense. He had not even asked her to write back. He had thanked her for handing him a book. And he had told her he would try in future not to be in places where she might have to see him. It was the last sentence that did it. I will be more careful in future about the places I am seen. She set the letter down on the table. She put her face into her hands. She did not weep. She sat there for a long time with the heels of her hands pressed against her closed eyes. And she breathed and she listened to the small ordinary sounds of her flat, the boiler ticking, the rain beginning again against the window, a pigeon shifting on the sill. And she thought about a man on a crutch in a narrow aisle, who had spent two years learning not to take up more space than he had been granted, and who had now resolved on the strength of one conversation in a bookshop to take up less. She thought, "He thinks he has frightened me." She thought, "He thinks the kindest thing he can do for me is disappear from the streets I walk on." she thought with a clarity that she did not like. And I have for two years let him think so. I have let an entire city be his act of penance toward me. I have not lifted a finger to tell him he need not perform it. She lowered her hands. She looked at the letter. She read it a third time slowly with the green ink of her own unscent letter heavy in the drawer of the desk behind her. And she understood with a quiet sinking that her letter was no longer the letter she needed to send. The four sides of named grief and named fury. They were true, every word of them. And they would have to be said eventually. and she would say them eventually in some form in some room with him present to hear them. But they were not the answer to this letter. She rose. She crossed to the writing desk. She opened the drawer. She lifted out the envelope with the four sides of green ink. And she set it on the desk. and she took a fresh sheet of paper from the box and she sat down and she wrote. She wrote nothing about the war. She wrote nothing about the tower. She wrote nothing about the hospital or the doorway or the minute she had stood watching him sleep. She wrote, "Malfoy, be in the places you would have been. Do not arrange your life around the possibility of me passing through it. I am not at present a person you owe a smaller footprint to. Whatever else may be the case between us that is not. I read the poem. I have known it for years. I do not in fact agree with her either. The art of losing is precisely as hard as she says it is. And the line is a trick. She's performing the very thing she claims is easy, and the performance is the proof of how it is not. I have always loved her for that and resented her for it in equal measure. I suspect you may have, too. If you should happen to be in the bookshop on a Tuesday afternoon, I should not be sorry to see you there." Hg. She read it through. She did not soften any of it. She did not add a postcript. She folded it. She addressed the envelope. She walked it herself that afternoon through a thin drizzle to the post box at the corner of her street. And she stood for a moment with her gloved hand inside the slot, the envelope held against the resistance of the metal flap, and then she let it go. She did not when she walked back feel relieved. She did not feel resolved. She felt, and this was a sensation she had not allowed herself in 2 years on this subject, interested. Interested in what would happen next, interested in what he would do with the sentence she had given him. The small permission folded into ordinary syntax. the line about Tuesday afternoons that she had sat down as though it were a fact about the weather. She walked home through the drizzle with her collar turned up and her hands in her pockets, and the small interest in her chest was warm and small and worrying, and she did not for once attempt to put it out. It was three days before his reply came. It came in the same hand on the same cream paper in the same restrained quantity. She did not this time make herself wait. She opened it standing at the kitchen counter. Granger Tuesday next then I will be in the back room where he keeps the secondhand poetry. He has held a book for me. I have been told that if I do not collect it by the end of the month, he will sell it to a man in Highgate who has been asking for it, which I take to be the book seller's version of Duress. I have stopped since your letter performing the arrangement of my life around the possibility of you passing through it. I will tell you since you have asked me to tell you that this has been in three days more difficult than the seven weeks of the leg. I tell you this not to put any weight on you. I tell you because I have committed in the matter of you to stop performing equinimity I do not feel. D. She read it once. She set it down. She turned to the window. The drizzle had thickened into rain. She watched it slide along the pain in long considered lines and she thought with no clearness at all about what the thought meant or where it would take her. Tuesday. Then she lifted the letter again and read the middle sentence a second time, and the small interest in her chest did not warm. It tightened instead into something that had begun, against her will and against her better judgment, to resemble the early shape of something else. Tuesday came in under a low sky, the color of puter. By 2:00 the rain had stopped, but the pavements held the wet of it in a dark mirrored shine, and the plain trees along the squares were dripping with the slow patience of trees that knew the air was not yet finished with weather. Hermione walked the short distance from the flu point in Russell Square through that quiet wet brightness, her gloves in her pocket, her hands cold, and she did not this time allow herself to rehearse anything. She had spent two days rehearsing. She had reached the end of what rehearsal could do. The bell over the bookshop door chimed. The book seller looked up, recognized her, and inclined his head in the small, precise nod he reserved for regulars. He did not say anything. He did not need to. His eyes moved briefly toward the back room. Then they returned to his ledger. She walked the length of the shop. The aisle of poetry ran along the back wall, and the back room really only a half room. The partition not quite reaching the ceiling opened off it through a low archway. The light in there was different. A single tall window faced a brick wall, and the brick threw the daylight back gray and soft, and the lamp on the small reading table in the corner was lit. A green shaded brass thing that cast a circle of warmer light onto the wood. He was sitting at the table. He had a book open in front of him and a second book unopened beside his elbow. The crutch was leaning against the wall behind his chair. He looked up the moment she stepped through the archway, and he set the book down at once, and he made a movement that was the beginning of standing before his body remembered itself, and he stopped. "Don't," she said quickly. "Please." He sank back into the chair. There was the smallest twist at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile, only the recognition of his own habit of courtesy and of how slowly his body was forgiving it. Granger Malfoy. She crossed the room and sat down in the second chair opposite him with the table between them. She unbuttoned her coat but did not remove it. She set her gloves on the corner of the table. He watched her do these things without remark. the way one watched a guest settle in a room one had already been sitting in for some time. "You are early," he said. "I am on time. You are early. I am usually here at this hour. I told you he holds books for me." And does he hold a chair for you as well? Apparently, the faintest exchange of something. Not warmth exactly, but the small permission to speak lightly, passed between them, and settled. She let her hands rest on the wood. The table had been varnished a long time ago, and was now worn through to bare wood at the corners where countless elbows had rested. "What are you reading?" she said. He turned the book so that she could see the spine. Edward Thomas selected poems. She raised her eyebrows very slightly. He died in France. Draco said in 1917 he wrote most of the poems in the last two years of his life. He had been a pros writer before that a reviewer. He turned to verse late and badly at first and then very quickly not badly at all. You have read about him. I have read everything in this shop about him. There is a great deal in this shop about him. I know. She looked at the book. She did not pick it up. She said after a moment, "Shall we walk?" He glanced at the window, the wet brick beyond it, the soft gray of the afternoon that was, as the afternoons did at this time of year, already beginning to lean toward evening. Then he looked back at her. "Yes," he said. He stood with the help of the crutch and the edge of the table, and a small, careful breath that he took before he put weight on the leg. She did not offer him a hand. She had already understood from the bookshop on the first day that he was working out his own arithmetic with his body, and that the kindness of offering a hand might not be a kindness at this stage. He nodded at her as though acknowledging the courtesy of her not offering. He left the second book on the table. The book seller, as they passed the desk, said, "I'll keep it for you." without looking up. And Draco said, "Thank you, John." And the bell over the door gave its small worn chime as they stepped out into Bloomsbury. They walked slowly. They walked by unspoken agreement north and east toward the railings of the British Museum and then around them rather than through because the courtyard would be too crowded and the reading room too loud with footsteps. They passed a square hermione did not know the name of a small one with a bench under a chestnut tree and they did not sit. They kept walking. He set the pace, and she matched it without remark. The crutch made a soft rubber tap against the wet pavement every two strides. A bus passed on a side road with its lights already on, although it was not yet 4:00. For perhaps the first 10 minutes, they did not speak. It was not a difficult silence. It was the silence of two people who had agreed without discussing it that they would let the air come in before any words did. It was he who spoke first. "His name is Thomas Okafer," he said. "The boy, his mother is a nurse. His father drives a bus on the 73 route. They live in a flat in Bloomsbury, two streets over from mine. The mother, she came to the hospital the day after. She brought him with her. She wanted him to see that I was alive. She wanted him not to carry the picture in his head of a man going under a van for him. Hermione listened. She did not interrupt. "He was very quiet," Draco said. He stood at the foot of the bed. He looked at me as though he were checking sums. Then he said, "I remember this exactly." He said, "Are your bones broken because of me?" And I said, "Some of them. They will mend." And he said, "Will you have to go to the hospital again?" And I said, "Only to be looked at, not to stay." And he nodded the way a small accountant nods when the figures come out right. and he said, "I'm sorry about your bones." And his mother began to cry very quietly with one hand over her mouth, and I He stopped. The crutch went tap on the pavement. He let perhaps three more strides go by before he continued. "I had not been thanked for anything in two years, Granger. Not by anyone. Not for anything. I had not, I think, allowed myself to be thanked. It was the boy's sorry about your bones that it was that in particular that I had not prepared for. She did not look at him directly. She kept her eyes on the wet pavement ahead. And so when you ask me in the bookshop, he said very low why I stepped into the road. Granger, I don't have a clean answer. I will not give you one. I saw the van. I saw the boy. I did not think. I do not believe looking back that there was a moment in which I weighed it. There was no moment. The body decided. I would like very much to claim that some moral apparatus was operating, that I had been preparing for 2 years to be a person who would do that, that the preparation paid off. I do not think that is true. I think I have been preparing for 2 years to be a different kind of person. And that man is not yet built. And a much older instinct than him is the one that took my legs into the road. What instinct? I don't know how to name it. The instinct of of not standing still when there was something to be done. I had stood still before on the tower in the manner drawing room when he stopped. He did not finish that sentence. The crutch went to tap. I had stood still in places where I should not have. I think the body in Russell Square remembered that it had stood still and refused to do it again and moved before the mind could intervene. That is the closest I can come. They walked. They came to a railing. They followed the railing. A young man on a bicycle rang his bell, and they edged sideways and let him pass. and the gap of his passing put their shoulders nearly together for two strides and then back apart and the brief warmth on her left arm registered before she had given it permission to "And the door," she said after a long moment. "On the seventh floor?" He did not answer at once. His pace did not change. The crutch tapped, tapped, tapped. They walked perhaps another 20 paces. My mother, he said finally. The word came out flatter than the others had. He had they had. There was a particular conversation in the spring of that year in which it was made clear to me by people who were able to make such things clear that the cost of failing to open the door would not be paid by me. that my failing had become, in their bookkeeping, an arrangement that involved her body in particular and various refinements of injury that they were prepared to make to it. I was 16, Granger. I am not telling you this to soften it. I am telling you this because you asked me not to be clever. And the unclear answer is that I opened the door because they had explained to me in considerable detail what would be done to my mother if I did not. I do not consider this a defense. I consider it a fact. There were other things I might have done. I might have gone to Dumbledore at the start of the year. I might have gone to Snape sooner. I might have gone to anyone. I did not. I was 16 and frightened. And I had been raised by people who had taught me there were only two doors out of a room of that kind, and one of them was the door I opened. I have spent. He stopped walking. Then he had stopped because his ribs were not after all entirely forgiven, and he had been speaking in longer breaths than his body could yet honor. He turned, leaning on the crutch, and faced her, and his face in the gray London light was the face of a man who had not slept the night before, and who was not going to sleep tonight either. I have spent 2 years, he said more quietly, trying to learn the other door. I do not know that I will learn it. I am trying. The road in Russell Square was not the other door. The road in Russell Square was a body that had got tired of standing still. But I would like very much, before I die, to walk through the other door with my eyes open. That is the project, Granger. That is all. I am not asking you to believe in it. I am answering your question. She had stopped walking too. She was looking up at him. He was a little taller than she remembered. Or perhaps she had simply in 2 years stopped letting herself remember accurately how tall he had been, because accuracy had been dangerous. The gray of his eyes in this light was the gray of the pavement and the gray of the sky and the gray of the brick around them as though he had been drawn out of the city itself. She did not say, "I forgive you." She did not say it because it was not true and because he had not asked for it and because the word in her mouth on this afternoon would have been a lie she did not wish to tell to him of all people. She said instead very quietly, "Thank you for not being clever." He inclined his head. He did not speak. A drop of rain, the first of a fresh round of it, the sky having decided at last to commit, fell onto the back of her hand, and another onto his shoulder, and the chestnut tree above the bench at the end of the square shivered as though it had felt the shift in pressure before they had. And somewhere along the road behind them, a window was thrown open and a voice called a child in for tea. "Walk me back," she said. "To the shop before this turns properly." He nodded once. He turned slowly on the crutch. She turned with him. They walked back the way they had come, not quite touching, the small, soft tap of the crutch, keeping time between them, and the rain, when it came down in earnest, found them halfway along the street, and they did not hurry. The fury did not come for 9 days. It came when it came on a wet Thursday evening at 9 with no warning that her body had thought to give her. She had been reading at the kitchen table. She had been reading the Bishop, in fact, the dark green volume from the shop, and she had reached a poem she had not read in years, a small one about a fish, the kind of poem that did not announce itself as being about anything until the last line, and she had turned the page and discovered that her hand was shaking. She set the book down. She watched her own hand for a moment, the way one watched a stranger's. The shaking was not large. It was a fine, steady tremor at the knuckles, the kind that came from very far underneath, and it was not, she realized, fear. She had been afraid often enough in her life to know the shape of fear in her own hand. This was the other one. This was the older one. This was the one she had not let out in any sustained way since the trials. She stood up. The chair scraped on the kitchen floor. She walked the length of her flat once and then back again. She poured a glass of water and did not drink it. she thought with a kind of cold clarity about the conversation on the wet pavement about the body decided about there were only two doors out of a room of that kind about I am answering your question about the thank you she had given him which had been true and the silence after it which had also been true and the way the Rain had found them on the walk back to the shop and the small civilized goodbye at the door. His nod, her Tuesday, his Tuesday, her stepping out under the dripping awning and into the apparition point at the corner. She had been kind. She had been just. She had behaved on the wet pavement exactly as the better angel of her nature had asked her to behave. And the worst one, the one she had been pretending for nine days did not exist, had been sitting at the bottom of her chest the entire time, perfectly patient, waiting for the kitchen and the green book and the small poem about the fish to give it permission. She crossed to the writing desk. She opened the drawer. The four sides of green ink were still there on top of the folded newspaper. She lifted them out. She did not read them. She did not need to. She knew what they said. She put on her coat. She did not bother with an umbrella. The rain had gone from showers to a thin steady falling, the sort that would soak through anything within 10 minutes and could not be argued with. She tucked the green ink letter into the inside of her coat. She picked up her wand. She did not even now allow herself to think the word apparate. She did not need to think the word. She thought the address. She arrived in a narrow lane behind a row of Bloomsbury terraces in the pool of dark between two street lamps. The muggle pavements at this hour were almost empty. A cat ran across the cobbles in front of her and vanished into an airway. She walked the short distance to the front of the building, a tall plain Georgian house, the door black, the brass numerals dull with age, and she did not let herself stop on the bottom step. She pressed the bell. She heard faintly somewhere above her the small electric sound of it ringing. She heard nothing else for a moment. Then she heard a door open inside and a slow uneven step on a staircase and a longer pause at what must have been a landing and then the step again and then the inner door of the building and then his shape behind the frosted glass of the outer door. He opened it. He did not have his crutch. He had instead a stick, a plain dark walking stick with a worn brass top that he was leaning on with his left hand. He was in shirt sleeves. He had clearly been reading. One of his fingers was still marking a place in a book that he was holding loosely in his right hand. His hair was untidy. His face, when he registered who was standing on his step in the rain, went through three expressions in quick succession. Surprise, then alarm, then a stillness she had begun to recognize as what he did with himself when he did not yet know what was required of him. Granger, I need to come in, she said. I need to come in and I need to say a number of things and I need you not to interrupt me until I have said them. May I come in? He stepped back at once. Of course. She crossed the threshold. He shut the door behind her slowly because the body still moved slowly. She did not take off her coat. The rain on her shoulders soaked through to the lining and she did not care. He gestured toward the staircase. She climbed it ahead of him. She heard him follow the slow, even tap of the stick on the wooden treads, and she did not slow down because she could not, in this state, do the polite work of waiting for a wounded man on a stair, and because she suspected he would not have wanted her to. His flat was on the first floor. The door stood open. She walked through it. The room beyond was small and warm and entirely lined with books. Proper muggle bookshelves of plain pine packed too deep in places. And there was a single armchair by a small gas fire and a writing table by the window and a kettle on a stand in the corner and a narrow doorway through to what she presumed was the rest of the flat. There was a vase on the writing table with a single sprig of something green in it. Not flowers, just a piece of bay or rosemary. the sort of thing a person put in a vase when they were trying to remember that they were alive. He came in behind her. He closed the door. He did not move past her. He stood, his back nearly against the door, his hands on the top of the stick, and he waited. She did not sit down. She turned to face him. "Lavender brown," she said. It came out steady. The tremor had moved up into her voice, but had not yet broken it. He did not move. Lavender Brown was 17. She was in my dormatory for 6 years. She had three sisters. The youngest was nine when she died. She was killed in the second floor corridor by Fenrier Greyback. He did not finish what he had started. He was driven off. She died of blood loss before anyone reached her. Her hand was on the marble of the staircase. I want you to know her name. I want you to know that I have not used her name aloud in this room before. I want you to understand that I am using it now. He had gone very pale. He did not speak. The fingers of his right hand had closed around the top of the stick until the knuckles widened. "Bill Weasley," she said. Bill Weasley has scars across the whole left side of his face. Grayback did not finish him either. Bill is alive. Bill has a daughter now. Bill's daughter looks at her father's face every morning of her life, and she has done since she was born. and she will do until one of them dies. That is one of the things you let into the school. That face that morning, that child. He did not look away. He did not interrupt. His mouth had set into a line that was not a sneer and not a frown and not anything else she had a name for. Colin Crevy, she said. She had not known she was going to say the name until she said it. Her voice broke very slightly on the sea. She did not stop. Colin Crevy was 16. He used to follow Harry around with a camera in our second year. He was muggleborn. He had snuck back into the castle that night. He should not have been there. He had no business being there. He died there anyway. She had begun at some point to cry. She had not noticed it begin. The tears were not noisy. They were running down her face in two thin lines and disappearing into the wet collar of her coat. She did not wipe them. She did not lower her eyes from his. I have not said these names aloud since the trials, she said. Not in any room. Not to Harry, not to Ron, not to my parents, not in my own kitchen. I have carried them on the inside of my mouth like coins for two years, and I have not once spat them out, because spitting them out felt like an indecency to them, like a use of them, like making them serve a moment of mine when they had already served enough. And tonight I have spat them out. And I have spat them out at you. And I want you to know that, Malfoy. I want you to know that you have between us the only room in London where they have been said aloud. He did not speak. You opened the door, she said. Her voice was thinner now, but she had not stopped. You opened the door and your reasons were the reasons of a frightened boy of 16 with a wand in his hand and a mother in another room. And I have heard those reasons now. And I have heard them from your mouth on a wet pavement in Bloomsbury. And I have heard them and I have understood them. And I want you to know, Malfoy, I want you to know that the understanding does not bring them back. The understanding does not unbleleed Lavender's hand on the staircase. The understanding does not unmake Bill's face. The understanding does not put Colin's camera back into his hand. The understanding lives in me and they do not. And it is an obscenity that those should be the two things in me at the same time. The understanding and the absence. I do not know how to carry both. She stopped. She breathed. I do not know, she said more quietly. How to carry both. I came here to ask you to carry one of them for me. I came here to give you the rage and to keep the understanding because the rage is too heavy and I cannot do it. I came here to put it down at your feet because because she did not finish the sentence. She could not. Her hand had risen against her will to her own mouth. He moved then. He did not come toward her. He set the stick very carefully against the wall beside the door. He stayed where he was. He lowered his hands to his sides. He did this so that she understood at once he was not holding anything. He was unarmed. He was standing in his own room in front of her with his hands open, and his face had stayed exactly where it had been through everything she had said, which was not impassive, not at all, but had the particular stillness of a man who had decided before she came in that whatever was going to be set tonight, he would receive at full weight and not duck. "Granger," he said. His voice was rough at the edge of it. He cleared his throat very quietly. "You may put it down," he said. "You may put down whatever portion of it you wish to put down. I will hold what you give me. I will not ask you to forgive what I have not yet earned the right to be forgiven for. I will not ask you anything tonight. I will only Granger. I will only say their names back to you if you would like so that they are said in this room twice. She drew in a breath. It came in unsteadily. She nodded once. Lavender brown, he said. He said it gently. Bill Weasley. Colin Crevy. She closed her eyes. The tears which had been quiet broke at last into the kind of weeping that took her shoulders. She did not move from where she stood. He did not move from where he stood. The small gas fire ticked in its great. The rain went on against the window. The vase with its springrig of green sat on the table between them like a small ordinary witness. And she wept and he stood and watched her weep. and he did not at any point in the long minutes that followed take one step closer or one step further away from where he had set down his stick. She did not stay long that night. When the weeping had eased, and it eased slowly, the way a tide eased in stages with small returns, she lifted her head and she said in a voice that was small but not unsteady. I am going home now. He nodded. He did not move toward her. He picked up his stick. He walked her slowly down the stairs and he opened the front door and the rain had thinned. He said, "Will you apparate from the lane?" She said, "Yes." He said, "Granger." She turned. He said, "Get out of the wet coat when you are home. Do not sit in it." It was the only sentence he allowed himself. and she nodded and she walked down the steps. She heard the door close behind her with a small unhurried click of a door closed by a man who was not going to stand at it watching her go. She did not in fact take the coat off when she got home. She sat on the floor in front of her cold fireplace with the wet wool heavy on her shoulders and she let herself shake and she let herself be cold. And she let herself for the first time in 2 years simply be a person who had not yet decided what she felt about a man. She did not write to him in the days that followed. He did not write to her. This was not, she came to understand, a punishment on either side. It was an agreed silence. He had said he would not ask her for anything that night, and he had meant it. She had said she did not know how to carry both, and he had heard her say it. There was nothing to be settled by an exchange of letters. The thing that had to settle had to settle in her. A week passed. She slept badly the first three nights and well after that she returned to work. She defended a clause on goblin reparations in front of a subcommittee. She had lunch with Jinny on the Saturday and did not say his name. and Jinny, who had, since Harry had told her something Hermione had not realized Harry had noticed, become very quiet on the subject of Malfoy, did not ask. They talked about the baby Flur was expecting. They talked about a play Jinny had seen. The afternoon was ordinary. Ordinariness, Hermione discovered, was a thing she could now tolerate in larger doses than she had been able to tolerate it for 2 years. A second week passed. She thought of him on and off, the way one thought of a window one had left a jar in a room one was not in. The thought did not press. It only sat faintly at the edge of every other thought, asking nothing. On the Tuesday of the third week, she went to the bookshop. She did not know when she set out whether she expected him to be there. She had not said Tuesday on his stairs. She had said nothing about Tuesday. They had had before that evening a fragile, small arrangement about Tuesdays. the back room, the green shaded lamp, the chair he sometimes sat in. But the evening on his stairs had been a different document, written in a different hand, and she did not know whether either of them now considered the Tuesday agreement still in force. The book seller looked up when she came in. He nodded. He said nothing. His eyes did not go this time toward the back room. They returned to his ledger. She walked the length of the shop anyway. The back room was empty. She stood for a moment in the archway. The lamp was on. The two chairs were as they had been. The table between them held a thin volume she did not recognize. a small book of letters, by the look of it, bound in pale brown cloth. She walked over. She picked it up. There was a slip of paper inside the front cover, a plain rectangle torn from a larger sheet. On it, in his hand, in a single line. He said, "You might come on a Tuesday. If you do, this is for you. It is not a gift. It is alone on the understanding that Lent books eventually come home. D. She read it twice. She turned the small book over. It was a selected letters of Edward Thomas, the man whose poems he had been reading on the first Tuesday. She opened it at random. The letter was to a friend written from a training camp in 1916. very plain, very practical, asking for a particular pair of boots. The handwriting in the printed reproduction had the same patient quality as Draco's own. She sat down at the table for a moment. She did not read the book. She held it and she breathed and she understood that he had been here perhaps on a different day of the week. perhaps on more than one, and that he had decided to leave her the means of his presence without imposing the presence itself. He had not been at the table waiting for her. He had not put himself in the position of a man being received or refused. He had only left a book with a note that was not an apology, that was not a request, that was not an explanation. Alone. Lent books eventually come home. She tucked the book into her coat against her ribs where the calling card had once been. She did not that day go to his flat. She went the following Tuesday in the late afternoon on her way home from work. She had brought the book back. She had also brought in the other pocket of her coat a thin paperback of her own, a muggle novel, an old green penguin, the corners soft, that she had decided he should read because there was a passage in chapter 11 that she suspected he would understand more fully than most of the people she might have lent it to. She walked from the flu point in Russell Square. The afternoon was cold and dry. The sky was a pale washed blue, the first such sky in some weeks. He opened the door. He was this time without the stick. He was holding it inside the room, leaned against the wall by the doorway in case he needed it. But he had not used it to come down the stairs. He had used the banister. She saw at once that he was walking better. His face had a little more color. He had been working. There was a smudge of ink on the side of his hand and a faint shadow of the same ink at the corner of his mouth, where she suspected he had absentmindedly held the end of a pen. Granger Malfoy. She held out the book. "Lent books," she said. "Eventually come home." He took it. His fingers in the moment of taking it brushed hers. It was not a long touch. It was the touch of two people exchanging a small object across a threshold, but it registered. She felt it the way one felt the small particular warmth of a hand at the wrist. He registered it, too. She saw a muscle move at his jaw. He did not look down at their hands. He looked at her face. "Come in," he said, "if you would like to." She came in. He shut the door behind her. He set the borrowed book on the writing table beside the vase, which today held three sprigs of rosemary rather than one. He turned and looked at her. The flat was warmer than the corridor. The gas fire was lit. The kettle on the stand was steaming faintly as though he had not been many minutes from making tea before she rang the bell. "I have brought you another one," she said. She drew the green penguin from her pocket. "There is a passage in chapter 11. You do not have to read the whole thing. I would only I would like to know what you make of it. All right. He took the second book. Their hands did not brush this time. He set it on the table beside the first. He stood for a moment with both palms flat on the table, looking at the two books as though making sure that they were really there, that the small architecture of Lent books come home. And here is another had really been built. He turned back to her. Will you have tea? Yes. He moved to the kettle. She unbuttoned her coat. She did not take it off entirely. She draped it over the back of the armchair by the fire and she walked to the bookshelf nearest her and read along the spines. Not because she wanted to read the spines, but because to stand still in the center of his small room felt suddenly like a thing she did not know how to do. He made the tea slowly. He had, she noticed, the small habits of a man who lived alone and had learned to take a certain pleasure in his own ceremonies. He warmed the pot first. He measured the leaves from a tin. He poured the water from a height. He let it stand. He set out two cups on a small tray. Plain white cups, none of the Malfoy crystals she remembered. Nothing fine. And he carried the tray with a stick tapping once on the floorboards as he steadied himself to the low table by the fire. She sat in the armchair. There was only one. He brought over the wooden chair from the writing table and set it across from her and sat down on it. And the two cups steamed faintly between them. They did not for a while speak. It was she in the end who reached for her cup. He reached for his at the same time. Their hands did not touch. But the simultaneity of the motion produced in both of them the small flicker of a smile small enough that in another room in another year neither of them would have noticed it on the other's face. How are your ribs? She said forgiven mostly and the leg in conversation with me. We have come to an understanding. It does not promise me a future as a runner. I do not ask it for one. You were never a runner. No, he said, but I was once a possible dueler. And a possible dueler is a thing that depends rather more on the leg than one realizes until the leg has opinions. Will it have opinions forever? Probably not. The healer says another 6 months. Muggle healer. Mostly yes. There has been. There is a witch in Hamstead who has consulted on it twice. She is discreet. She does not require my name in full. She is content with the leg and the bones and the question of whether the bones are mending. I find I prefer it that way. You see only muggle doctors otherwise. I do. Why? He looked at his cup. He turned it a quarter turn in its saucer. The motion was unhurried because they do not know me. He said, they do not know what I was. They treat the leg as a leg. They treat the ribs as ribs. There is something There is a great deal to be said, Granger, for being treated as a body and not as a history. I have had two years of histories. I find I would rather, when I am being mended, be a body for a little while. She set down her cup. She looked at him across the small low table. And when you are not being mended, she said, "Who treats you as a body and not as a history?" Then he was very still. He set down his own cup. He looked at her. The gray of his eyes in the firelight was the gray of the inside of an oyster shell. The slight faint iridescence at the edge. Granger, he said very low. I am not certain. I am not I am not certain. That is a question I should answer. Why not? Because if I answer it honestly, the answer will be no one. The answer will be that no one has touched me in two years except to mend something and that the mending hands have not stayed past the mending. The answer will be a thing I have not let myself name in any room. And if I name it in this room to you on this Tuesday while we are drinking tea, I will have used it as a as a as an instrument. I will have put it into the air for a reason. and I do not I will not do that with you. She did not answer at once. She did not look away. She reached very slowly across the small low table and she lifted his hand from where it had come to rest beside his cup. And she turned it palm up and she let her own hand rest in it. Just that. No pressure, no closing of the fingers, her palm in his palm. He did not move for what seemed a very long moment. Then, with great care, as if he were handling something that might prove not to be there, the fingers of his hand closed very lightly around the edge of hers. The pad of his thumb settled once against the soft inside of her wrist and stayed. Neither of them spoke. The fire ticked. The tea steamed. The light against the window was beginning to go. Winter came in earnest in the last week of January. The snow began on a Friday, late after most of London had gone to bed, and by Saturday morning, the city had been quietly remade in white. The squares of Bloomsbury were unrecognizable. The plain trees stood with their bare arms suddenly given a kind of dignity, each branch outlined in a thin, clean ridge. The pavements had been walked on here and there by early risers, but the prince was soft and few, and the sound of the city had gone down by half, as it did under snow, as though someone had laid a hand over the mouth of the place. Hermione walked to him. She had not apperated. She had stepped out of her flat in Camden in her warmest coat and her good boots, with a scarf wound twice around her throat, and she had taken the slow way down through the streets behind King's Cross and across the long bare stretch of Tavistock Square and along the narrow lane behind the museum and into the row of Georgian terraces. and the walk had taken her over an hour, and at no point in that hour had she rehearsed a single sentence. She had been with him by then, through two months of Tuesdays. The Tuesdays had become, without either of them naming what they were becoming, the shape of her week. They had drunk a great deal of tea. They had read aloud to one another sometimes when the silence in his small flat asked for a voice, and neither of them wanted to be the one to speak first about themselves. They had walked once the leg had let him in the long flat afternoons of December along the back streets of his neighborhood, and on the colder days they had stayed in. and he had lent her three books and she had lent him five and the small architecture of lent books eventually come home had grown into a small architecture of come back next week. They had not spoken again in any sustained way about the war. The names she had said on his stairs had been said, and he had said them back to her, and what remained of them now lived between them as a fact, not as a wound that required dressing every Tuesday. He had not kissed her. She had not kissed him. The hand in the hand in the firelight on that one Tuesday in early December had not been repeated, and had not been forgotten. It had become a kind of ground, a thing the rest of the Tuesdays had quietly stood on. There had been other small touchings. His fingers at the small of her back once when he had stepped past her at the writing table, her hand on his sleeve. Briefly, the afternoon she had come in out of a sudden hail, the brush of his thumb against the side of her cup, as he had taken it from her. None of these had been negotiated. None of them had been spoken about. They had simply happened in the way that the small motions of two people who shared a room came to happen, and afterwards the room had absorbed them, and they had drunk their tea. But this Saturday was not a Tuesday. She had not in two months gone to him on a day that was not a Tuesday. She rang the bell. It took him slightly longer to come down than it usually did. When the door opened, he was without the stick. He had stopped using it indoors a fortnight ago and on the stairs a week ago, although she suspected it still lived against the wall of his entryway for the days when the leg was in a worse temper than the rest of him. He was in a dark jumper and trousers, and his feet were in soft house shoes, and his hair was a little flattened on one side, as though he had been lying on the small sofa beneath the window with a book, which he probably had. He registered her on his doorstep. He registered the snow on her shoulders. He registered. She saw that it was Saturday. Granger, may I come in? Of course. She stepped past him. He shut the door behind her. She did not climb the stairs ahead of him this time. She waited at the foot of them, and they climbed together slowly, her shoulder a few inches from his, and the warmth of the building closed over them as they went up. The flat smelled today of the gas fire and of something baked, a small cake perhaps, or a tray of biscuits, the sort of thing he had begun in the last few weeks to produce on Tuesdays without explanation, and to set plate and all on the low table between their chairs, as though he were not certain whether to offer it or not. There was no cake on the table today. The kettle had not been put on. He had clearly not been expecting anyone. He turned to face her in the center of the room. Is something the matter? No. Are you well? I am well, Malfoy. She stopped. She had not, after all, brought a sentence with her. She had only brought herself and the snow and the slow hour of walking and the small clear thing in her chest that had finished arranging itself sometime during the night and had been when she woke this morning waiting for her complete. She unwound her scarf. She laid it over the back of the armchair. She unbuttoned her coat and let it slip from her shoulders and laid it over the scarf. She stood in the middle of his small, warm room in her jumper and her good boots and her snow damp hair and she looked at him. He had not moved. "I have been thinking," she said, about Tuesdays. "Yes, I have been thinking that I have been arranging my week around a Tuesday. Yes, I have been thinking that I do not wish to. His face did not change at once. There was a small pause. Then she saw the small adjustment in him that meant he had heard the sentence both ways and was waiting with the patience he had learned to find out which way she had meant it. "I do not wish to wait until Tuesday," she said. He breathed in. He did not move toward her. She had not expected him to. It was not his role in the room they had built to move first. She crossed the small space between them. She did not stop until she was perhaps a hands width from him. She tilted her face up. She lifted her right hand slowly, the way she had lifted his hand across the low table in December. slowly with no pressure, with the understanding that he was permitted to refuse the gesture if any part of him wished to refuse it. And she laid her palm against his cheek. She felt him go still. It was a particular stillness. It was not the stillness of a man bracing. It was the stillness of a man who had not been touched in two years on the face by a hand that meant him no harm and asked him for nothing. His eyes closed, his head turned by perhaps half an inch into her palm. The faintest weight of his cheekbones settled into the cup of her hand. He did not lift his own hands. He let her, she understood, set the pace. Malfoy, she said, very low. He opened his eyes. I am not here to forgive you, she said. I do not have a forgiveness to give you. I am not here to pretend that what was done is not what was done or that what was lost can be put back. I am here because Malfoy, I am here because I have for two months looked at the inside of a small room with you in it. And I have been unable since November to look at the inside of any other room without thinking about the inside of this one. And I have decided that I would rather be a person who is honest with you about that than a person who continues to arrange her weak around the fiction that I am not. He did not speak. He could not at once. The muscle at his jaw moved. The hand at his side lifted finally, and he laid his fingers very lightly over the back of her hand where it rested against his face. Not to press it harder, not to pull it away, only to acknowledge it. Granger, he said. The single word was rough. Yes, I am. I am not. I do not have a clean version of myself to give you. You know that? Yes. I do not know that I will ever have a clean version of myself to give you. I know. Then then we will live in the version we have. His other hand came up. His fingers grazed her temple, the place where her hair had begun to dry in fine curls. And they moved slowly with the particular care of a man who has been frightened of his own hands for a long time into the soft of her hair behind her ear. His palm settled there. He did not pull her toward him. He waited. She lifted her face the rest of the way. The kiss, when it came, did not come from him. She rose onto the balls of her feet very slightly, and she pressed her mouth to his. It was not a long kiss. It was not a hungry one. It was the kiss of two people who had between them two years of silence and two months of Tuesdays and one hand in another in firelight and who had agreed in this single soft moment that the silence was finished. His mouth was warm. He held very still under her for a heartbeat, as though he did not yet trust the news his own face was bringing him. Then he made a small sound at the back of his throat. Not a sob, not a word, only the small involuntary acknowledgment of a man finding that a thing he had not allowed himself to want was nevertheless being given to him. and he kissed her back. When she lowered herself onto her heels again, his forehead came to rest against hers. Both his hands were in her hair now. Her hand was still on his cheek. The other one had come at some point to rest against the front of his jumper, the flat of her palm above the place where his ribs had been mended. They stood like that for a long moment. Granger," he said. His voice was thick. "I should I should warn you. I am very likely to fail at this." At what? At at being the man you have decided to stand in a room with. You are not in fact the man I have decided to stand in a room with." He drew back very slightly to look at her. There was alarm at the corner of his mouth. She smiled. It was the first proper smile she had given him in two years, and she felt the small, unfamiliar shape of it on her own face. "You are the man I have decided to stand in a room with while he tries to become the man he is trying to become." She said, "I am not asking you for the finished version. I do not require the finished version. I require I have decided I require the trying. I have decided that I can stand in a room with the trying. I will tell you when I cannot. I will tell you plainly. I will not soften it. You will not have to guess. He closed his eyes again. His forehead came back to hers. She felt the slight tremor in him. Not fear. this one, something else, the older thing in him, giving way at last to a newer thing. And she did not remark on it. She only stood with her hand on his cheek and her palm on his chest, and she let him have the minute he needed. When he opened his eyes again, she said very quietly, "Make me tea, Malfoy. It is Saturday and there is snow outside and I have walked a long way and I would like a cup of tea. He laughed. It was a short laugh, hardly more than a breath, and it was a sound she had not heard from him in any year of her life. He stepped back from her slowly, his hands sliding out of her hair and down to rest, briefly at her shoulders and then falling to his sides. He turned toward the kettle. He moved across the small room with the slight unevenness of the leg that would, the healer said, be in conversation with him for another 6 months, and which would, she suspected, in some quieter form, be in conversation with him for the rest of his life. He warmed the pot. He measured the leaves. He poured the water from her height. She sat down in the armchair by the gas fire and watched him do it. Outside the window, the snow had begun again, very soft, very small, the flakes drifting past the pain, the way the ash had drifted up the flu of her great the night she had burned her three first openings. The light in the room was the warm low light of a winter afternoon. He brought the tray to the low table. He sat down her cup. He sat in the wooden chair across from her. He looked at her. She lifted her cup. She did not drink at once. She held it in both her hands, and she felt the warmth of it through the white china, and she looked at the man across the table, at his snow pale hair, the new color in his face, at the small, private, settled thing at the corner of his mouth that was not a smile and not a snear and not anything she had a name for, but was, she thought, the look of a man who had been permitted on a Saturday in January to begin. Malfoy, she said. Granger, drink your tea. He smiled. He drank his tea. Outside the snow went on falling, and the small flat held them both, and the day, against all the arithmetic she had once been so certain of, was warm. Three years on, the flat in Bloomsbury was no longer only his. They had not married, not yet, though the small velvet box had been sitting in the third drawer of his writing desk since the spring, beneath a stack of his unanswered correspondence, in a hiding place so deliberately obvious that Hermione, who put away his laundry on Thursdays, had been pretending for four months not to have seen it. She wished him to choose his moment. He was a man who, in matters of consequence, took the long way around, and she had learned in the years of their being together, that the long way around was very often the way he came to a thing most fully. The flat had grown a second bookshelf along the wall opposite the fire to accommodate her books and a small writing table beside the window to accommodate her work. The vase on his writing table now held on most weeks whatever she had brought home. Narcissus in the spring, corn flowers in the summer, the small white roses of a garden in Hamstead in the autumn, sprigs of rosemary and bay in the winter, the same green sprigs that had been there the first night she had climbed the stairs in a wet coat. There were two armchairs by the gas fire now. He had bought the second one in February of the first year, and had moved the wooden chair back to the writing table, and had said nothing about the symbolism of having got a second armchair, and she had said nothing back about it, and the two chairs had stood there ever since. She had stayed at the ministry. She had been promoted twice. The reparations work she had begun in the years after the war had widened into a department of its own. And she now ran it with three juniors and a small budget and a particular reputation in the corridors for being a woman. One did not interrupt during a meeting. She came home most evenings at 7. She came home on Fridays at 5. He had in the second year opened a small shop. It had surprised no one more than him. It had begun as a favor to John, the book seller in Bloomsbury, who had been looking to retire and had no one to leave the shop to, and had, over the course of nearly 2 years of Tuesdays, come to understand that the pale young man on the crutch knew more about the secondhand poetry on the back shelves than any customer who had ever come through the door. Draco had bought the shop. He had not used the Malfoy name on the lease. The sign above the door still said J Whitlock book sellers in the same chipped guilt it had said it in for 31 years. And he had not when he had taken possession replaced it. He had only added in much smaller letters beneath established 1894 under new management since 2002. John came in on Wednesday afternoons to drink tea and to argue with him about pricing. Draco was a worse businessman than Jon had been, and the shop made by careful muggle accounting almost no money, and Draco did not mind because the shop had not been the point of the shop. The point of the shop had been that he had needed at some moment of his life to have somewhere to go. He had told her this once late in the evening of the day he had signed the papers with his head in her lap on the sofa by the fire. He had said, "Granger, I do not know how to explain to you what it is to have a place I am allowed to be in. I have lived for 3 years in this flat and it is mine and I love it and it is not the same thing. The shop is a place I am allowed to be in where other people who do not know my name come in and out and I am the man behind the desk and I sell them a book and they thank me and they leave. Do you understand what I am saying? She had understood. She had not that night said anything in reply. She had only smoothed the hair back from his temple and let him fall asleep with his head in her lap. And she had sat there for another hour after he was asleep, watching the fire. And she had thought, "He has built himself a door he is allowed to walk through. He has been building it for 5 years. He has finally walked through it. She helped him in the shop on Saturdays. The boy, Thomas Urka, came in often. He was 10 now. He was tall for his age and serious about books in the way that certain children were serious about books. and he had developed over the years of his coming in a habit of lining his elbows on the front desk and asking Draco questions about poems Draco had not yet read, which Draco then had to read in the evenings in order to be ready for the next conversation. Thomas's mother sent Jolof rice in a covered dish once a fortnight. Thomas's father, the bus driver, brought in his old paperbacks for credit and refused to take the credit. And Draco refused to take the paperbacks without giving the credit. And the two men had between them an ongoing standoff of mutual courtesy that was conducted entirely in nods and small headshakes, and had been going on for nearly four years without resolution. Narcissa was out of France. She had returned very quietly in the autumn of the second year. She lived in a small house in Wiltshire that was not the manor. The manor had been sold to the reparations trust and was now by the trust's slow careful decision in the process of becoming a residential school for children orphaned in the war. Narcissa had not objected. Narcissa, in fact, had been the one to suggest it in a letter to her son that he had read once and then folded and put inside the cover of his copy of the bishop where it had stayed. She came to London once a month. She had tea with Hermayan alone on the second Sunday of every month in a small muggle cafe in Marilleone that neither of them had been to before they began to go to it together. The first such tea had been an event of considerable nervous stiffness on both sides. The second had been less so. By the sixth, they had developed a habit of bringing each other small things. A book, a tin of biscuits, in one instance, a pair of gloves Hermione had admired, and Narcissa had remembered, and the tease had become, without either of them describing them this way, a fixture that neither would have given up. Narcissa called Hermione my dear now. She had begun doing so very tentatively in the third month. Hermione who had not anticipated being called my dear by Narcissa Malfoy in any version of her life had not corrected her and so it had continued. Harry had taken longer. Harry had taken nearly a year. There had been a single bad afternoon in the spring of the first year in which Harry had come to Hermayan's old flat, and they had had the first proper argument of their adult friendship, and Harry had said a number of things he had later quietly retracted, and Hermione had said a number of things she had not retracted, because she had meant every one of them. The argument had not been about Draco. The argument had been about the fact that Hermione was making a choice that Harry did not understand, and about Harry's discovery that his not understanding it did not entitle him to a vote. He had gone away. He had thought about it. He had come back 3 weeks later with a bottle of wine and an apology and he had said, "I do not know him. I do not, I suspect, want to know him very well yet. But you are not asking me to. You are asking me to know you, and I do know you, and if you are choosing this, I am. Hermione, I am with you in choosing it." He and Draco had two years on reached an arrangement that involved Christmas. They came, both families, to Andromeda's house in Devon, where Teddy now had a half brother and a small dog. Draco and Harry did not even now sit next to each other at the table. They sat across. They passed the gravy. They asked after each other's work. Once a year in the late evening, when the children had gone to bed, and the wine had gone down a third bottle, they spoke briefly in a corner of the kitchen about something neither of them ever afterwards reported to anyone else. Hermione did not ask what they spoke about. Jinny did not ask either. The corner of the kitchen conversation, whatever it was, was a thing that belonged to the two of them, and not to the women who loved them, and the women who loved them had agreed in a glance across the table over the years to let them have it. Ron had been the easiest in the end. Ron had taken six months to be civil, and another six to be friendly. And after that he had simply in his way decided that Draco was a person who existed in the world Ron lived in and he had got on with living in it. He came into the shop sometimes. He bought cookbooks. He had married a witch named Audrey who Jinny said was the kindest person any weasley had ever brought home. And they had a baby named Rose. and Rose had at six months old gnawed thoughtfully on the corner of a first edition of Edward Thomas that Ron had not realized he had taken off the shelf. Draco had not charged him for it. Ron had insisted on paying. They had compromised in the way of men who had been at war with each other for a decade and at peace with each other for three years by Ron leaving a 10 note on the desk and Draco not picking it up until Ron had left the shop. The leg in the end had kept its promise. It was in conversation with him still on the cold mornings, and it would be in conversation with him on the cold mornings for the rest of his life. He did not mind. The conversation was by now a thing he had learned to have without resentment. He used the stick on the worst days. On the best days he forgot for hours at a time that the leg had ever been a matter of attention at all. On the Saturday in October that he chose finally to take the small velvet box out of the third drawer. The weather was very nearly the weather of the morning she had read the article. The rain was the patient fine gray kind. The pavements held a dark mirrored shine. The plain trees were beginning to copper at the edges. He took her to walk in the square where she had once sat on a bench under a chestnut tree and folded a newspaper into the lining of her coat. Although he did not know that because she had never told him. They walked. He did not this time lean on a stick. The rain held off mostly until they reached the bench. He sat down with her. He took her hand. He said her name very low, the way he had said it on the staircase the night she had said three other names aloud. He took the small box out of his coat. He did not make a speech. He had decided a long time before that the speech was not the thing. He opened the box. He showed her the ring, which was plain and old, and not anything that had belonged to any Malfoy. It had belonged to a woman in Bloomsbury, who had porned it to a shop in Marchman Street in 1923, and had never come back for it. And Draco had bought it from the shop the previous spring and had cleaned it himself and had had it sized to her finger by guess and it fit. He said, "Will you, Granger?" She said, "Yes." He slid the ring onto her finger. He kissed the inside of her wrist where her pulse had been four years before when his thumb had first settled against it across a low table by a gas fire. The rain began in earnest as they walked back. They did not hurry. He limped very slightly. She matched his pace as she had always matched it without comment. At the door of the flat he paused with his key in the lock and turned to look at her. And his face in the wet October light was the face of a man who had not after all failed at the thing he had warned her he was likely to fail at. Granger Malfoy come in out of the wet. She smiled. She came in. The flat was warm. The fire was lit. The kettle was on the stand. The two armchairs were by the fire. And the vase on the writing table had three sprigs of rosemary in it. And a book lay open on the arm of one chair where he had left it that morning. And the small architecture of Lent books eventually come home had become, without either of them ever saying so, the small architecture of a life. He hung up her wet coat. She put the kettle on. He sat down in his chair. She, when the tea was made, sat down in hers, across from him, the table between them and the fire light on both their faces. She lifted her cup. He lifted his. "Drink your tea, Malfoy," she said. He smiled. He drank his tea. Outside the rain went on falling, and inside the room was warm, and the two of them, against every arithmetic the world had once been so certain of, were home. >> So that is the end of today's story. I want to say a few small things before you go. I did not write this to say that a law can fix everything. It cannot. names stay broken. Some names stay heavy in the mouth. Hermione never forgot what Draco did. She never pretended it did not happen. She did not forgive him on one Tuesday and forget him on the next. What she did was harder. She decided to stand in a room with him while he tried to become a better man. Not the finish man, the trying man. That is a different choice. That is a quieter choice. And I think it is the bravest one in the whole story. People ask me sometimes, can a person change? I do not know. I think a person can try. I think trying every day for a long time looks a little bit like changing in the end. Draco did not save that child to be forgiven. He saved him because his body would not stand still one more time. That is not redemption. That is a beginning. And maybe that is enough for a beginning. Thank you for staying with me until the last word. Thank you for sitting in that small warm flat with the two of them. Thank you for letting them drink their tea. Take care. yourself this week. Be gentle with the people you love. And if you are trying to become someone, keep trying. Someone is standing in the room. I will see you in the next