Draco Saw Her Last | Dramione (Harry Potter) Fanfiction

They mourned her for 2 years. They wrote her name in stone, but one man kept the file in a locked drawer because the dead do not leave fingerprints on the ink. A whispered mind how you go. For 2 years, he thought those were his last words to her. Our story begins this moment. The notice arrived with the morning post slipped between a bill from his apothecary and an invitation to a charity gala he would not attend. Cream parchment the ministry seal pressed deep enough to dent the fiber. Draco Malfoy set down his coffee, and the porcelain rim met the saucer with a small, precise click that seemed, in the silence of his Kensington flat to ring like a bell told inside his own chest. He did not need to open it. He knew the shape of what it would say. He had drafted the language himself three weeks ago in a meeting room on the second floor of the aura office, sitting across from a junior cler whose hands had trembled as she took down the dictation. In accordance with statute, after 24 months of unbroken absence and exhaustive investigative effort, the ministry hereby declares he had stopped speaking. Then he had cleared his throat, asked for water, and finished the sentence looking at the floor. Now the parchment lay on his breakfast table, and the cream of it was almost obscene against the dark wood. and the rain outside was the soft, persistent rain of a London morning that knew it would still be raining at dusk. He opened it. He read it three times. The third time he read it slowly, the way a man reads the name of a stranger he is certain he has met somewhere before and cannot place. Hermione Xeen Granj born 19th September 1979 last verified location the entrance to the department of mysteries 11:42 in the evening 3rd of November officially deceased as of this morning. He set the parchment down. He stood. He walked to the window. The rain was beading on the leaded glass in small trembling commas. And beyond the glass, somewhere across the city, a bell was actually tolling. Not for her, of course, only the half hour from a church on Cromwell Road. But for one ridiculous second, he allowed himself to imagine it was. He pressed his forehead to the cold pain. He stood there until his breath fogged the glass and the fog blurred the rooftops. And the rooftops became indistinct shapes that could have been anything, anything at all, any city, any year, any version of himself. He had been 30 when she vanished. He was 32 now. The arithmetic of grief had a way of making itself shamefully small. He did not go to the office. He sent an owl to his department head, a curt apology, the word indisposed, which would be read correctly and not questioned. Then he poured himself a measure of fire whiskey at 10 9 in the morning, and he sat down in the armchair by the unlit fire, and he allowed himself to think about the corridor. The corridor was the part he could not put away. It returned to him in the way certain music returns. Uninvited in the middle of doing something else. Torch light low along the walls. The hum of the ministry's late night enchantments. A sound somewhere between a held breath and the vibration of a tuning fork struck against bone. He had been coming up from the holding cells with a stack of warrants. he no longer remembered the contents of. She had been coming the other way. She had a satchel slung across her chest, and her hair was pinned up in the careless, halfdecided manner of a woman who had been at her desk for 14 hours, and had stopped caring how she looked sometime around the eighth. They had stopped, both of them, the way people stop when they have a long history of disliking each other, and have nevertheless arrived at an awkward armistice. He had nodded. She had nodded. The torch light had moved very slightly on the wall, the way torch light will, and the shadow of her had crossed the shadow of him on the stone, and for one half second their two shadows had merged into a single dark shape. He had said, "Working late, Granger," she had said. Always. He had said, and this was the part he replayed. This was the part that would not leave him alone. This was the small, clean, idiotic part. Mind how you go. She had not smiled. She had not been the sort of woman who smiled at him by then. But something had moved in her face. A softening perhaps, or only the trick of the torch light, or only the kind of softening that exhaustion will allow in the presence of any human voice at all. and she had said, "You too, Malfoy." Then she had stepped into the lift, and the gilded grill had drawn across, and the doors had closed, and she had descended into the Department of Mysteries, and no one had seen her again. He drank the fire whiskey in one swallow. He poured another. He drank that one more slowly. He had been the aura on her case. That was the official phrasing, the aura on the case, as though the case were a horse. And he had been the one assigned to ride it. He had ridden it for 2 years. He had ridden it through every corridor of that building, through every interview with every witness who had nothing to give him. Through every dawn at his desk, with the case file open and his eyes burning, and the words on the parchment swimming into shapes that meant nothing. He had ridden it past the point at which Potter had stopped speaking to anyone, past the point at which Weasley had quietly put on his uniform robes and married the loveg good girl in a small ceremony, Draco had not been invited to. Past the point at which the ministry had begun in its careful institutional way to suggest that perhaps it was time to reassign him. He had not been reassigned. He had simply stopped reporting on it. The file had moved by a process he himself had initiated into the category of cold. And then 6 months ago he had taken it home. It was not in the drawer of his desk at the ministry. It was in the drawer of his desk here in his flat. the drawer with a cheap brass lock he had to jiggle twice before it would catch. He was not supposed to have it. The penalty, if anyone bothered to enforce the penalty, would not be career ending, but it would be ugly. He did not care. He had stopped caring about a great number of things in the past two years, and the file, oddly, was not one of them. He poured a third measure. He carried it across the room. He sat down at the desk. He worked the lock. The file was thick. It had become thick the way a wound becomes thick with scar. Layer on layer of useless tissue. Every interview transcribed, every floor plan annotated, every theory pursued to its dead end and pinned there like a moth. He knew the contents the way a priest knows his liturgy. He could have recited the witness list from memory. He could have drawn the floor plan of the department of mysteries blindfold. He opened the file at the page he always opened it at the dragonhide ledger. The ministry's entry log for the night of the 3rd of November. Her signature second from the bottom of the page. HJ Gringanger. The looped H. The precise J with its small impatient tail. The Granger compressed slightly at the end as though she had been hurrying. He had looked at this signature, he estimated, perhaps a thousand times, perhaps 2,000. He had looked at it for so long that it had ceased some months ago to mean anything. Had become a shape, an arrangement of curves on a line, the way a word repeated aloud will eventually shed its meaning and become only a sound. He looked at it now. The fire whiskey was warm in his chest. The rain was still falling. The window of his study faced east, and the morning light, such as it was, fell across the page at an angle that was not the angle he was used to. He had always looked at this page in the evening by lamplight. He had never in two years looked at this page in the cold, gray light of a wet morning at 10:00. The ink was wrong. He did not register it as a thought at first. He registered it as a small unease, a sensation behind the breastbone, the kind of feeling one has when one walks into a room and knows without being able to say why that someone has moved a piece of furniture an inch to the left. He frowned. He leaned closer. He drew the lamp on his desk towards the page and lit it with a flick of his wand and the warmer light pulled across the parchment and he saw it. The ink was wrong. Hermione Granger's ink and he knew her ink. He knew it the way he knew his own. He had spent two years reading her marginelia and her memorander and her witness statements and her every signed acknowledgement of receipt. Hermione Grers's Ink was a particular blue black, the specific shade produced by Scriven Shaft's Premier Reserve, which she had used since her sixth year at Hogwarts, because she liked the way it dried matte rather than glossy. It was the ink of every other signature she had ever placed on a ministry document. It was the ink of every signature she had placed on a ministry document for the seven years preceding her disappearance. The signature on the ledger was not that ink. It was close. It was extraordinarily close. To a casual eye, to any eye that had not spent two years drowning in her handwriting, it was indistinguishable. But it was not Scriven Shaft's premier reserve. It was a shade fractionally warmer, the black bleeding the smallest degree towards brown. The kind of difference a man might never notice unless he sat one morning at his own desk, with the wrong light falling across the page at the wrong angle, and the right amount of fire whiskey in him to have stopped trying to see what he expected to see. He stared. He did not move. He did not breathe for what felt like a very long time. The rain went on falling against the window. The lamp on his desk made its small steady sound. Somewhere in the flat above his, a kettle began to whistle and was lifted from a hob and went silent. He set the glass down. He set it down very carefully because his hand had begun quite without his permission to shake. If the ink was wrong, the signature was not hers. If the signature was not hers, she had not signed herself into the department of mysteries on the night of the 3rd of November. If she had not signed herself in, he stood up. He sat down again. He picked up the page in both hands and held it under the lamp. And he turned it and he turned it again. And he held it at the angle of the morning light. And he held it at the angle of the lamplight. and he held it flat on the desk and looked at it the way one looks at a face one has loved and not seen for a very long time, searching for what is the same and what is not. It was not her hand. It was not her ink. It was the work of someone who had studied her hand and her ink with terrible patience, and had produced a forgery of such delicacy, that only the precise wrong light on the precise wrong morning, in the precise wrong condition of a man drinking before noon, on the day his only failure had been made official, could have revealed it, which meant someone had wanted her to be seen entering the department of mysteries that night, which meant she had not entered it, which meant he stood. The chair fell behind him. He did not notice. He walked to the window, then back to the desk, then to the window again, and the parchment was still in his hand, and the rain was still falling. And somewhere very deep beneath his sternum, a sound was building that was not quite a word and not quite a breath. And his free hand had gone to his mouth, and he was pressing his knuckles against his lips so hard that the bone of his wedding finger, he wore no ring. He had never worn a ring. The gesture was inherited from a grandmother he had loved and lost, went white against the skin. She had not been in that lift. She had not descended into the Department of Mysteries. The last person who had seen Hermione Granger alive had been him in a torch lit corridor telling her to mind how she went. and someone somewhere with access to the ministry's most secured registries and a knowledge of her handwriting intimate enough to fool the entire aura office for 2 years had taken her from that corridor and rewritten the record of where she had gone. The parchment was trembling. He realized after a moment that the parchment was trembling because his hand was trembling and his hand was trembling because the rest of him had begun very quietly and without any sound at all to come apart. He set the page down. He reached for the fire whiskey. He stopped his fingers an inch from the glass and he did not pour and he did not drink and he did not move. And the rain went on and the lamp burned. And somewhere in London a bell told a quarter passed. And Draco Malfoy stood alone at his desk in a gray morning light and understood with a clarity that felt almost like grief turned inside out that she might still be. He did not pour the drink. He stood with his fingers an inch from the glass for what might have been a minute or might have been 10. And then he drew his hand back and he closed the file and he locked the drawer and he washed his face in cold water at the kitchen sink until the skin of his cheeks burned. And then he sat down at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands and tried with the careful method of a man diffusing a hex he himself has cast to think. If he was wrong, he was a drunk seeing what he wanted to see in the morning light. If he was right, he was the only living person who knew that the wizarding world had spent 2 years mourning of fiction. Either possibility was unbearable. Only one of them required him to act. He went back to the study. He took the parchment out again. He laid it flat on the desk and beside it he laid three other documents he had kept from her hand. a memorandum she had once sent him during a joint or a Department of Mysteries inquiry signed at the bottom in the same blue black. A witness acknowledgement from a case the previous winter. A Christmas card she had sent to the office in her second year of work, the one year she had bothered before she had given up the pretense that any of them at the aura office were friends of hers. He had kept the card. He did not examine why. He laid it now beside the ledger page, and he bent low over the four signatures, and he looked. The card, Scriven Shaft's premier reserve, Matt, blue, black. The memorandum the same. The witness acknowledgment the same. The ledger page not the same. He sat back in the chair. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until small lights bloomed behind the lids. Then he opened his eyes and he looked at the ledger page again, and he saw, this time what he had not allowed himself to see the first time, that the pressure of the quill was wrong, too. Hermione had written with the lightest hand of anyone he had ever known. Her letters were precise, but they did not bite into the parchment. They sat on it the way a feather sits on a water. The signature on the ledger page bit faintly, almost imperceptibly, but it bit. Whoever had made that signature had been concentrating very hard on the shapes of her letters and had forgotten the lightness of her wrist. He drew a long breath in through his nose and let it out very slowly through his mouth. He needed to think about who. It was not a question he could ask in the office. It was not a question he could ask anywhere that the question itself might travel. The forgery on that page had been made by someone with access to the ministry's registry of entrance logs, which meant either a cler of the department of mysteries or someone with the authority to require a cler to look the other way. The first category contained perhaps 14 people. The second category contained perhaps four. He knew the names of all 18. He had interviewed half of them in the first 6 months of the investigation. None of them had given him any reason then to look at them twice. But he had not been looking for a forgery. Then he had been looking for a kidnapping or a body or a confession. He had not been looking for the kind of crime that required a man to alter the record of where a woman had gone in order to alter the record of what had been done to her. He stood up. He paced. The rain had not stopped. The light at the window was the same gray light it had been at 10:00. And it was now. He checked the clock on the mantelpiece. half 1 in the afternoon. He had eaten nothing. He did not want to eat. He wanted more than he had wanted anything in 2 years to be wrong. Because if he was right, the next thought that arrived in his head was going to be the thought that she might be alive. And if he allowed himself that thought, and was then proved wrong by some second, more careful examination of the page, he was not certain he would survive the second loss of her. He had survived the first one only because he had not at the time understood what he was losing. That was the thing he had never said aloud, not to anyone, not even to himself in any sentence he had let finish. He had not loved Hermione Granger when she vanished. He had not even by any honest accounting liked her. He had respected her in the weary distant way that one professional respects another whose competence is impossible to deny. They had crossed paths at the ministry perhaps 30 times in the two years she had worked there. They had spoken in total for perhaps 4 hours of his life. He had not on the night of the 3rd of November said mind how you go because he cared what became of her. He had said it because it was the kind of thing once said in a corridor at midnight, and because he had been tired, and because some small fragment of the school boy he had stopped being a long time ago had been moved by the way her hair was coming down out of its pins. That fragment had grown in the two years since into something he had no name for. It had grown in the dark the way certain plants will. It had been watered by every late night at her case file and every dawn at his desk and every photograph of her that he had pinned to the wall and taken down and pinned back up again because he could not bear to look at her face and could not bear to not look at it. It had grown in short in her absence. The way grief grows, the way obsession grows, the way the love of dead saints grows in the hearts of the men who pray to them. He sat down on the floor of his study, his back against the desk, and he put his face in his hands, and he did not weep. He had not wept, not once in the two years since she had gone, and he was not going to weep now. But he sat there for some long time with his hands over his face, and the rain went on, and the light at the window did not change, and somewhere very far away, a clock chimed the hour, and he did not count the chimes. When he stood up again, he was sober. It was the strangest thing. He had drunk three measures of fire whiskey on an empty stomach before noon, and he was sober. His hands were steady. His mind was clear. He understood in the way one understands a thing one has known for a long time without permitting oneself to know it that there were exactly two paths in front of him now. The first was to take the ledger page to his department head this evening to lay it on the desk to explain what he had seen and ask for the investigation to be reopened. The second was to tell no one and to begin to look alone for whoever had made that signature. Because if the forger had access to the ministry's registries, then the forger had access to the aura office. And if the forger had access to the aura office, then the moment Draco Malfoy laid that page on a desk in the building, the forger would know what he had seen, and whatever trail still existed, if any trail still existed, would be wiped clean before the morning. He did not need to think about which path he would take. He had known which path he would take from the moment his hand had stopped shaking. He locked the file back into the drawer. He left the flat. He walked through the rain without an umbrella because he wanted the cold of it on the back of his neck because he wanted the world to be palpable around him. because the thought he was not letting himself think was beating so hard inside his chest that he was afraid he would faint if he did not have the bite of November rain to remind him he was still in his own body. He walked to the small apparition point at the end of his street and he turned on his heel and he reappeared in an alleyway in Diagon Alley and he walked into a quiet bookshop that sold among other things the kind of reference works that the ministry did not officially permit its auras to consult. He spent 4 hours there. He read about the forging of magical signatures. He read about a particular school of European forgery practiced in the late 19th century by a man named Vasilv in which the forger studied his victim's hand for months before making a single mark. He read about the way such forgeries could be detected by ink, by pressure, by the angle at which certain letters were closed. He bought three of the books, paid in cash, and left the shop with the parcel under his arm, and the rain still falling, and the early dark of November beginning to settle on the rooftops of the alley. He went home. He ate mechanically a piece of bread and a piece of cheese because he had remembered on the walk back that he had not eaten. He sat down at his desk with the books beside him and the ledger page in front of him. And he read until midnight. And at midnight he closed the books and looked at the page again. And he understood with a quiet that was almost peace that he had been right. The signature was a forgery. It had been made by someone trained in the Vasilf method or in a method very close to it. There were perhaps a dozen wizards in Britain capable of such work. He knew the names of three of them. One of them had died the previous spring. One of them was in Asaban. The third was a man named Irasmus Quill, who had retired from the ministry's archival service four years ago, and who lived in a small cottage in the Cotswwells, and who, according to the staff roster Draco had memorized in the first month of the investigation, had been on duty at the Department of Mysteries registry desk on the night of the 3rd of November. Draco sat very still in his chair. The lamp burned. The rain had stopped at some point in the last hour, and the silence in the flat was the deep ringing silence that follows long rain. A silence with a weight to it. A silence that pressed against the window panes from outside. He had a name. He had a name and he had a forgery and he had a thought he had not yet permitted himself to finish. The thought that if she had not gone into the department of mysteries that night, she had gone somewhere else. And if she had gone somewhere else, she had perhaps not been killed there. And if she had perhaps not been killed there, she was perhaps He stood. He went to the window. He pressed his forehead against the cold glass and he closed his eyes and he allowed himself for the first time in two years to say her name aloud in the empty flat. Granger. It came out as a whisper. It came out horse as though his throat had forgotten the shape of the word. It came out the way a prayer comes out of a man who has not prayed in a long time and is not certain anyone is listening. He opened his eyes. The street below was empty. A single lamp burned at the corner, throwing its yellow circle on the wet stone, and a cat moved across the circle and out of it again, and the world went on being the world. Tomorrow he would go to the Cotswwells. Tomorrow he would knock on the door of Arasmus Quill. Tomorrow he would find out whether the rest of his life was about to begin or whether he was about to lose her for the second time. And worse, tonight he stood at the window with her name on his tongue, and he did not move, and he did not weep. And the silence of the after rain pressed in on the glass, and somewhere in the flat behind him, the lamp on the desk gutted once, briefly, as though someone unseen had passed. He left at dawn. He took the early train out of Paddington because apparating into the Cotswwells would be logged at the regional point and he was no longer willing to leave the trace of his movements anywhere a cler might read them. He sat in a corner of an empty carriage with his coat collar turned up and watched the city give way to flat fields under a sky the color of puter. And the train moved through the gray morning like a small dark insect across the back of a sleeping animal. And he did not think. He had taught himself in the night how not to think about the thing he was about to do. He had taught himself to think instead about the route, the timing, the precise words he would use at the door. Arasmus Quill was 73 years old. lived alone, kept three cats. He had been retired four years from the Department of Mysteries registry, where for 31 years he had logged the comingings and goings of the Ministry's most secret personnel with the silent, scrupulous discretion of a man who knew the value of his own silence. He had never married. He had no children. He was on every record Draco had been able to find, a man of unremarkable habits and unremarkable means, which was itself the most remarkable thing about him, because no man who had stood at that desk for 31 years could have failed to be offered at some point a great deal of money for what he knew. The train slowed. A village appeared, then was gone. Another sheep in a field standing perfectly still as though painted there. The hedge were bare, and the beness of them, the small black latises of them against the gray fields, struck him with a sudden sharp feeling he had no name for. And he closed his eyes against it. The train went on. He got off at a country halt where the platform was empty and the station master did not look up from his newspaper. He walked the lane out of the village with his hands in his pockets and his collar still turned up and after a mile the lane forked. And after another half mile, the second fork ended at a low stone wall, and beyond the wall was a small cottage with a slate roof and a wisp of woodsm smoke rising from its chimney into the cold air. He stood at the wall for a long moment. He had not planned in any detail what he would say. He had a halfozen openings rehearsed, each one a different angle of approach, and he discarded all of them as he stood there looking at the cottage. He would say what was true. He would say it badly, perhaps, but he would say it, and he would watch the old man's face, and he would know. He opened the gate. He walked up the flagstone path. He knocked. Footsteps inside. The slow, careful footsteps of a man who has come to expect very little of his door. A pause. The door opened. Arasmus Quill was smaller than Draco remembered him. He had been a thin man at the registry desk with a long neck and the patient faintly amused expression of a heron. He had shrunk in the four years of his retirement. His shoulders had drawn forward. His hair, what was left of it, was a soft white halo around the dome of his skull. He looked up at Draco with pale, watery eyes, and for a moment there was nothing in his face at all. And then there was something, a flicker, the smallest pulling tight of the skin at the corner of his mouth. the recognition not of a name but of a category of visitor. The category Arasmus Quill had perhaps been waiting four years to receive at his door. "Mr. Malfoy," he said, and his voice was thin, but steady. "You had best come in." "Draco did not move at first. He had not expected the door to open easily. He had not expected the name. He had been prepared for denials, for indignation, for the slow door closing courtesy of an old man pretending not to understand. He had not been prepared to be received. He stepped inside. The cottage smelled of wood smoke and old paper, and the faint mustustiness of a place inhabited by an old man and cats. A fire burned low in the great. Two of the cats were asleep on a worn red armchair, and the third, a thin ginger thing with one torn ear, watched Draco from the top of a bookcase with the steady disinterest of a creature who had long since concluded that human business was beneath its notice. Quill closed the door behind him. He did not offer tea. He did not offer a seat. He stood in the middle of his own small parlor with his hands clasped in front of him and he looked at Draco and he waited. Draco took the ledger page from inside his coat. He held it up. This is not her signature, he said. Quill's eyes moved to the parchment. They rested there for a long moment. Then they returned to Draco's face, and the old man drew a breath that seemed to come from somewhere very deep inside his thin chest, and he let it out, and his shoulders, already drawn forward, drew forward a little further. "No," he said. "It is not." Draco's hand did not tremble. He had been expecting this answer, and he had prepared his hand not to tremble, and his hand obeyed him. But somewhere behind his sternum, a thing he had been carrying for 2 years lurched, and he had to set his jaw to keep his face from changing. "Did you make it?" "No," said Quill. "I logged it." "Who made it?" The old man's eyes went past Draco's shoulder to the small window above the kitchen sink. The light through the window was the same put light as the sky, and it fell across the side of his face and made him look for a moment like a man already half a ghost. "Mr. Malfoy," he said, "please sit down." Draco sat. He did not want to. He sat in the armchair opposite the one with the cats on it and he kept the ledger page in his hand and he kept his eyes on the old man's face and he waited. Quill lowered himself onto a wooden chair by the fire. He moved like a man whose knees pained him. He folded his hands in his lap. He looked at the fire for some time before he spoke. I knew, he said, that one day someone would come. I did not think it would be you. I thought if anyone came, it would be Potter or the red-haired one. I did not think they would send the man who had been on the case because the man who had been on the case had been chosen. I assumed for reasons that made it unlikely he would ever look this carefully. The words landed without inflection and yet each one was a small precise wound. Draco did not respond. He had been chosen for the case. He had always understood because his name made the wizarding press unwilling to suggest the investigation had been mishandled by sympathy. He had been chosen because no one would accuse Draco Malfoy of going easy on the trail of a missing muggleborn war hero. He had not until this moment considered that the same calculation might have been made by the person who had needed the investigation to fail. "Who?" he said. His voice was very quiet. Quill looked at him. The pale eyes were perfectly steady. "I cannot tell you a name," he said. Draco rose from the chair. He did not raise his voice, but something in the air of the small room changed, and the ginger cat on the bookcase stood up and stretched and walked unhurriedly out of the parlor and did not come back. You will tell me his name. I cannot, said Quill, because I do not know it. Draco stood there. The ledger page in his hand had begun to shake very slightly against his will. He set it down on the small table beside the chair. He went to the fire. He stood with his back to the old man and his hands flat on the mantelpiece and he stared into the low red coals and he made himself breathe. "Tell me what you know," he said without turning round. The fire crackled. A log settled. Behind him, Quill drew another of those long breaths and let it out. A man came to me three weeks before the night. He said he came at the registry. He did not give a name. He gave a sum. The sum was such that I will not insult either of us by repeating it. He asked only that on a night to be named later, I would log a particular signature as having entered the Department of Mysteries at a particular hour, and that I would not look up from my desk when the signature was made. That was all. He did not tell me whose signature. He did not tell me why. I did not ask. You did not ask. I did not ask, Mr. Malfoy, because I had stood at that desk for 27 years, and in 27 years I had been offered many things by many men, and I had refused everyone, and I was tired. He paused. That is not an excuse. I am offering you the truth, not an excuse. Draco did not turn round. He could not yet. His hands on the mantelpiece had gone white at the knuckles, and he was not certain what his face was doing, and he did not wish the old man to see. "Describe him," he said. "I cannot describe him. He wore a glamour, a very fine one. I saw a man of middle height in a dark coat, and I would not know him again if he sat in this chair." That too was part of the arrangement. The voice. The voice was disguised. A simple charm, but adequate. Anything. Anything at all. A silence. The fire crackled again. Outside, somewhere far away, a dog began to bark and then stopped. He wore a ring, said Quill, on the smallest finger of his left hand. I noticed it because his hand was on the desk when he set down the purse. A signate ring. silver. The device on it was a serpent swallowing its own tail. Draco's hands lifted from the mantelpiece. He turned slowly. The old man was looking at him with a patient stillness of a man who had carried a thing for a long time and was perhaps glad at last to set it down. An Uroberos, said Draco. Yes. On the left smallest finger. Yes. Draco sat down. He sat down because his legs would not in that moment continue to hold him. He sat in the armchair opposite Quill and he placed his hands on his knees because he did not know where else to place them. And he stared at the worn rug between them and he tried to think. He knew the ring. He knew the ring because he had seen it perhaps a dozen times in his life on the hand of a man who sat three offices down from his own at the ministry. A man whose name appeared on no roster of suspects because his name had been from the first hour of the investigation on the roster of those Draco himself had reported to. A man who had been present at every weekly briefing on the case. A man who had at the third such briefing leaned across the table and clapped Draco on the shoulder and told him in a voice of warm paternal sympathy that no one expected miracles, that some cases simply ended in silence, that he should not blame himself when the trail went cold. Draco's mouth had gone dry. He looked up. Quill was watching him. The old man's face had not changed. "You know him," said Quill. "It was not a question." "Yes, I thought you might." "Why have you not gone to anyone with this?" "Mr. Malfoy," said Quill very gently. "I am 73 years old. I live alone in a house at the end of a lane. I have three cats and a small pension and no living relations. The man who came to my desk that night did not ask me to keep silent. He did not need to. He looked at me and he set down the purse and he left. And I understood the shape of what would happen to me if I ever spoke of him. And I understood also that no one would ever ask until today. The fire crackled. The ginger cat returned from wherever it had gone and sat in the doorway and looked at them both with its disinterested green eyes. Draco stood. He moved to the door because he had to move because if he stayed in the chair, he would do something. He did not know what that would frighten the old man and dishonor them both. At the door he stopped, his hand on the latch, and he stood with his back to the room and his forehead almost touching the wood. and he understood with a clarity that was almost unbearable that the man whose name he now knew had sat across from him at a long polished table every Tuesday morning for 2 years and had asked in a voice of grave concern whether there had been any progress. He did not turn around. "Mr. Quill," he said, and his voice was steady because he had made it steady. The way a man makes his hand steady before a duel, you will need to leave this cottage. I will not. He will know I have been here within a day, perhaps within hours. He has watched me for 2 years. He will be watching now. Mr. Malfoy. The old voice behind him was not afraid. It was, if anything, faintly amused in the way of a man who has long since made his peace with the manner of his own ending. I am too old to run, and there is no place I would care to run to. If he comes, he comes. I would rather meet him here by my fire than in some safe house in a town I do not know, surrounded by men who would resent the work of keeping me alive. Draco turned. The old man was watching him with those pale, patient eyes, and his hands were folded in his lap, and one of the cats had climbed into his lap and was kneading at the loose fabric of his trousers. And the whole small scene was so quiet and so domestic that it took Draco a moment to understand he was looking at a man who was telling him in the gentlest possible language that he had chosen. If he kills you, I will have no witness. You will have me as a witness only as long as I am alive, Mr. Malfoy. That has always been true. If he kills me before you have done what you mean to do, the testimony I have given you in this parlor will have to suffice. You have a quill in your coat. Write it down. I will sign it. Notoriize it later by whatever method you prefer." He did. He sat down at the small table by the window, and he took the quill and the small bottle of ink he carried, and he wrote out what Quill had told him in the precise legal phrasing of a sworn statement, and Quill read it without changing a word, and Quill signed it at the bottom in a hand that was, Draco noted with a flicker of something almost like grief, perfectly steady, Draco folded the statement and put it inside his coat against his chest and he stood and he looked once more at the old man by the fire. Thank you, he said. Find her, said Quill, if she is to be found. That is the only thanks I will accept. Draco walked the lane back to the village in silence. The puter sky had not lifted. The sheep in the field had not moved. He walked with his hand pressed flat against his coat where the folded statement lay as though the parchment were a wound that might bleed if he did not keep pressure on it. and he tried to put her face to the ring with the uraoros on it and could not because every time he tried the face dissolved into the warm paternal smile of the man who had clapped him on the shoulder and said, "No one expects miracles." The man's name was Casius Yaxley, not the Yaxley of the war, a cousin. distantly a man who had come up through the department of international magical cooperation in the late ' 90s, who had moved laterally into the department of mysteries in the chaos after the Second War, who had been promoted with a smoothness that Draco had attributed at the time to administrative competence, and now understood with a slow, cold turning of the stomach to have been something else entirely. Yaxley was on the Wizenger. Yaxley sat on three oversight committees. Yaxley was, by any honest reckoning of the back corridors of the ministry, one of the six or seven most powerful men in magical Britain. And he was powerful in the particular way that did not announce itself. The way that left no fingerprints, the way that made it possible for a woman to vanish from a corridor at midnight, and for 2 years of investigation to find nothing at all. The train back to London was slower than the train out. Draco sat in the same corner of the same empty carriage and watched the same flat field slide past in reverse and he thought he could not move against Yaxley directly. Yaxley sat above him in the chain of command. Yaxley had allies on the Wizing who would close ranks around him at the first whisper of accusation. The statement folded against his chest was enough to begin an internal investigation, but an internal investigation would be assigned by Yaxley's own circle, and the statement would disappear into a draw within a week, and Arasmus Quill would die quietly in his sleep within a fortnight, and that would be the end of it. He needed something else. He needed to find her if she was alive. And the careful part of his mind would still not let him say she is alive would only let him say if she is alive. Then Yaxley had been keeping her somewhere for 2 years. And the keeping of a living person for 2 years required infrastructure, a place, people to maintain the place, wards, supplies, money moving through channels that left somewhere a trace. The train pulled into Paddington at half 4. The afternoon light had gone, and the station was a great cavern of yellow lamps and steam, and the press of bodies returning home. Draco moved through the crowd without seeing it, and he apparated from the alley behind the cab rank to a street in Bloomsbury, and he walked three blocks through the deepening dark, and he climbed the steps of a tall, narrow house with a brass plate beside the door, and he rang the bell. It was answered by a woman of perhaps 40 in a gray shaw who looked at him without surprise and stepped aside to let him in. She did not speak. She did not need to. Draco had been to this house twice in his career, and both times the woman had let him in and led him upstairs and left him at a door. and both times he had emerged from that door an hour later with information he was not by any official measure permitted to have. She led him upstairs now. The house smelled of campher and beeswax and the particular dry smell of old books kept in rooms that were never properly aired. At the second landing, she stopped at a door and tapped twice and stepped back and Draco went in. The room was small. A desk, a green shaded lamp, a man at the desk, very thin, very pale, with the long fingers of someone who had spent his life turning the pages of ledgers no one was supposed to read. He did not look up. Malfoy, he said. Belleweather, you have not been here in 11 months. I have not needed anything in 11 months. You need something now. It was not a question. Money, said Draco. I need to know the movement of a particular man's money over the last two years. Personal accounts, family trust, anything held in nominee. Blew looked up. His eyes were the color of weak tea, and they were perfectly without expression, and they rested on Draco's face for a long moment. Which man? Casius Yaxley. The eyes did not change, but Bellweather sat back in his chair, and he set down his quill, and he was silent for what felt like a long time. "Mr. Malfoy, he said at last, I will do this for you because I have done other things for you and because the fee will be substantial. But I will say to you once and once only that the man whose accounts you are asking me to open is a man who has in the last 6 years caused the deaths of at least four people whose only error was to look at his ledger from the wrong angle. I do not say this to refuse you. I say this so that when you walk out of this house tonight, you will walk out of it understanding the weight of what you are carrying. I understand it. I do not think you do, but you will. He named a sum. Draco did not haggle. He counted out the gallions onto the desk and Bellweather swept them into a drawer without counting them himself and he picked up his quill again and he said 3 days come back Thursday at 7. Draco stood at the door. He stopped. Belle h. A second question. A property. Anything held by him or by any nominee of his that is not on the public register. A small house somewhere remote. Somewhere a person could be kept. Bellweather's quill paused above the parchment. He did not look up. That is a different kind of search. Can it be done? Most things can be done. Thursday 7. The same fee again. Draco nodded. He left the room. He went down the stairs. And the woman in the gray shaw let him out. And he stood for a moment on the top step of the house with the cold night air on his face. And he made himself breathe. He walked home. He did not apperate. The walk from Bloomsbury to Kensington was long, and the night was cold, and the streets of central London at 6:00 on a Tuesday evening were thick with people moving in the small, distracted hurry of homeward lives. He walked through them and he saw them and he was struck as he had been struck many times in the two years since she had vanished by the strange unbearable continuence of the ordinary world. The cabs in their cues. The vendor at the corner of a square selling roasted chestnuts from a brazier whose coals lit his face from below. A young woman in a red coat laughing into the upturned face of the man she had stopped to greet. The thousand small ongoing facts of a city that did not know it had spent two years grieving a lie. He stopped at the corner of a street he did not need to be on. And he stood under the lamp and he watched the laughing young woman in the red coat walk away on the arm of her companion. and he thought with a clarity that took him by the throat, if she is alive, I will not be the man I was. He did not know what man he would be. He knew only that the man who had stood in the corridor and said, "Mind how you go?" and watched the lift doors close on her, that man was already gone. had been gone since the morning he had looked at the ledger page by the wrong light. The man who was walking home through the cold streets of Bloomsbury and Mayfair and Kensington was a man who had spent the day learning that the most powerful enemy he had ever faced was a man whose secretary brought him coffee at 11 each morning and who had set in motion with two questions in a small room in a tall narrow house. a sequence of events that would end either in his finding her or in his being killed for trying. He climbed the steps of his flat. He let himself in. He stood for a moment in the dark of his own hallway, his back against the closed door and he closed his eyes and he allowed himself to think for the first time the thought he had not let himself think. Hold on, he thought, wherever you are, hold on. I am coming. Then he opened his eyes and he walked into his study and he sat down at his desk and he took out a fresh sheet of parchment and he began to write the list of every place in Britain a powerful man might hide a woman for 2 years without. Thursday came slowly. He went to the office on Wednesday because not going would itself have been a signal. And he sat at his desk in the long open room with the other auras moving around him. And he wrote reports on three closed cases with the precise economical hand he had used for two years. And he did not look up when Yaxley passed his desk at quart 10 on the way to the morning briefing. He did not look up. He kept his quill moving. He felt the air behind him shift as the man went by, and he registered, without permitting his face to register, the faint scent of bay rum and pipe tobacco that always announced Yaxley's passage, and he wrote on. In the briefing room, Yaxley took his accustomed seat at the head of the table. Draco took his at the foot. There were nine other auras present, and the briefing concerned a new spate of cursed object thefts in Nocturn Alley, and Yaxley spoke about jurisdiction and resource allocation in the warm colleial voice he used in such rooms. And twice he made a small, dry joke that drew laughter from the table. And once his eyes passed over Draco's face without resting on it. Draco took notes. His hand was steady. He had been trained by his father and by his school and by the long discipline of his own survival to sit at tables with men who would kill him and to give nothing away. And the training held. At the end of the briefing, Yaxley rose, and as he passed Draco's chair, he paused and he set his hand for the briefest moment on Draco's shoulder. And he said in the voice of warm paternal sympathy that Draco had heard a hundred times. "You look tired, Malfoy." The notice yesterday. I know what it cost you. Take some leave. You have earned it. The hand lifted. Yaxley moved on. Draco sat very still in his chair, looking down at the parchment in front of him. And he did not breathe for perhaps 4 seconds. And then he breathed again, and he wrote a single line at the bottom of his notes that no one looking over his shoulder would have understood. and he kept his ink and he stood and he left the room. He went to Thursday at 7 the way a man goes to a jewel he has not chosen. The woman in the gray shawl let him in. The stairs, the door, bellweather at the desk, the green shaded lamp, the long pale fingers folded now on the blotter. Sit down, Mr. Malfoy. He sat. Bellweather did not speak at once. He looked at Draco for a long moment, and the weak tea eyes were for the first time in Draco's acquaintance with the man, not entirely without expression. There was something in them, something that might have been pity if Belleather had been the kind of man who pied. "I have your money," he said. He pushed a folder across the desk. It was thin. Draco opened it. The first page was a list of payments quarterly. 300 gallions each drawn from a nominee account held in the name of a shell trust in the Channel Islands paid into a second nominee account that distributed them onward to three separate vendors. a grosser in North Allaton, a small apothecary in Whitby, and a name Draco did not recognize that Bellweather had annotated in his small precise hand, household staff, single individual, female, employed 19 months. The second page was a map, a coastline, the Yorkshire coast, north of Whitby, a single property marked in red ink. The property was not on any public register. It had been held for the better part of a century by a succession of nominee trusts whose only common feature was that each, when followed far enough back, dissolved into the holdings of a particular old wizarding family whose surviving male line consisted of one man. Draco's finger rested on the red mark on the map. the cottage, the coast. He looked at it and he understood in the cold, quiet way he had begun to understand things in the past 3 days that he was looking at the place where she had been kept. 19 months, he said his voice was level. The staff was hired 19 months ago. The quarterly payments began 23 months ago. There is a 4-month gap at the beginning during which the property was being prepared. The vendor's deliveries are consistent with the maintenance of two persons in residence, one permanent, one constrained. The pattern is unmistakable to anyone who knows what to look for. And you know what to look for, Mr. Malfoy. I have known what to look for since before you were born. Draco closed the folder. He held it flat on the desk under his hand for a long moment and then he slid it inside his coat and he stood. Bellweather. If I do not return, I will burn every page of every record of your visits to this house, and I will deny under any truth serum legally administered that I have ever met you. That has always been the arrangement. You did not need to ask. Thank you. Do not thank me, Mr. Malfoy. Go. He went. He did not go home. He went to a small rented room above a pub in White Chapel that he kept under a name that was not his own, and he changed out of his aura robes into clothes that would not mark him as ministry, a heavy oil skin coat, dark trousers, boots that had been broken in by long walking, and he packed a satchel with what he thought he might need and what he hoped he would not need. and he stood for a long moment in front of the small clouded mirror over the wash stand and looked at his own face. It was a face he did not entirely recognize. The skin under the eyes was bruised with sleeplessness, and the mouth was set in a line he had not seen on himself before. and the eyes, the gray eyes that his mother had given him, and that he had spent his life learning to hold steady. The eyes were the eyes of a man who had stopped being afraid of certain things, and had become, in the leaving behind of that fear, capable of others. He took the night train north. He did not sleep. He sat in a corner of a compartment with a satchel between his feet and his coat collar turned up and he watched the dark country slide past the window and the train rocked and at some point in the small hours a porter came through with a lamp asking if anyone wanted tea and Draco shook his head and the porter went on and the lamp light moved away down the corridor and Draco Eco was left with his own face faintly reflected in the black glass of the window, ghostly and doubled and watching him back. He arrived in Whitby at 4 in the morning. The town was asleep. He walked from the station through empty streets that smelled of salt and fish and wet stone, and at the harbor he hired for cash, a small boat from a man who asked no questions, and a pony from a man who asked fewer, and he took the pony track north along the cliff for seven miles in the cold dark. And by the time the eastern sky had begun to gray, he had come within sight of the cottage. It stood alone on a low promonry, where the cliff dropped away to a small shingle cove. Slate roof, stone walls weathered almost black by a century of salt wind. Two narrow windows on the seawward side, both shuttered, a single chimney with no smoke. A path winding down from the cottage to the cove and a small rowing boat upturned on the shingle. And beyond the boat, the gray sea moving against the stones with a long, slow breathing of a thing that had been breathing in that place for longer than any human memory. He tied the pony in a hollow of gorse a quarter of a mile inland. He approached the cottage on foot, low, keeping to the dead bracken. He stopped at 50 yards and crouched and watched. He watched for an hour. The light came up. The sky over the sea turned the color of old puter than the color of slate. Then, very briefly, a thin pale gold at the horizon where a band of cloud broke. He watched. Once a gull cried. Once somewhere inside the cottage a chimney pot made a small metallic ticking as the rising sun warmed it. Nothing else moved. The wards were old. He could feel them at his teeth from where he crouched. The particular dental pressure of longestablished defensive enchantment. They were good wards. They had been laid by a careful hand, and they had been renewed by the feel of them recently. But they had been laid by a man who had not anticipated being looked for by the one aura in Britain, who had spent 11 years of his own life inside the family wards of an old wizarding house, and knew by intimate apprenticeship exactly how such wards were keyed, and exactly where. At the corner of every such ward, the small unavoidable seam in the weaving lay. He found the seam. He worked it. It took him 20 minutes. And at the end of the 20 minutes, the pressure at his teeth eased, and a small gap opened in the air at the seawward corner of the cottage's protections, and he stood up and walked through it. He moved to the cottage door. It was not locked. The wards had been the lock. He laid his hand against the wood and pushed very slowly, and the door opened on hinges that had been recently oiled, and he stepped into a small flagged passage that smelled of wood smoke and damp wool, and something faintly medicinal he did not at first identify. He drew his wand. To his left was a kitchen with a banked fire and a kettle on the hob and a single cup overturned on the drying board. To his right was a parlor with two chairs and a small table and a book lying open and faced down on the table as though its reader had set it down a moment ago to fetch something from another room. Straight ahead, a narrow stair rose into the dim upper floor. He stood at the foot of the stair. He listened. There was a sound from above, very faint. The smallest creek of a floorboard, the kind of sound a person made when they had heard something and had risen very slowly to listen. He set his foot on the first step. He went up the stair with the silence of a man trained for 14 years in the silent movement of his own body. The stair gave once near the top a small wooden complaint he could not prevent and he froze and he listened and there was no answering sound and he went on. At the top of the stair was a landing three doors. The first stood a jar on an empty room with a stripped bed. The second was closed. The third The third was at the seawward end of the cottage, and beneath its door a thin line of gray morning light showed, and as he stood there looking at that thin gray line, he heard from beyond the door the very small sound of a single indrawn breath. He moved to the door. He laid his hand against it. He did not speak. He did not knock. He turned the handle and he pushed it open and the morning light from the seawwood window fell across the room and he saw she was standing by the window. She had her back to the door. The window faced the sea, and the cold gray light fell full on her, and she was thinner than he had prepared himself for, much thinner. And her hair, which he had remembered as a great unruly weight of it, had been cut to her shoulders, and lay there flat and dull, the color of old wood. She wore a gray dress that did not fit her. She had heard the door open. She did not turn. He stood on the threshold. He had rehearsed on the train a dozen different sentences with which to begin. Every one of them died in his mouth. He stood and the wand in his hand hung at his side, and he did not speak. And after some long moment, she said without turning round in a voice that was horsearo with disuse, but unmistakably hers, "If you have come to kill me, do it from where you stand. I would prefer not to see your face." He could not speak. He tried. The sound that came out of him was not a word. It was the small, dry sound of a man whose throat has closed around what he was about to say. he swallowed. He tried again. Granger. Her shoulders went rigid. It was a small movement, the kind of movement a body makes before the mind has decided what to do with the information it has been given. And it told him more than anything else how completely she had been alone for 2 years. She did not turn for a long moment. When she did turn, she turned slowly, the way a person turns when they are afraid that what they are about to see will not survive being looked at. She looked at him. Her face was the face he had carried in his head for 2 years, and it was not. The bones of her cheeks stood too sharply under the skin. There was a small white scar at her temple that had not been there before. Her eyes, her eyes were the eyes he remembered, the brown of them, the particular alert intelligence of them, but they had a stillness in them now that was not the stillness of peace. And they rested on his face with an expression he could not at first read. It was not joy. He had not, in the careful preparation of himself, allowed himself to expect joy, but the absence of it in her face was a thing he had not adequately prepared for. And he stood with his hand loose around the wand at his side, and his mouth open on a word he did not have. and he watched her look at him. And after some long moment, she said very quietly. You? Yes. You were the last person I saw. Yes. In the corridor, you said. Her voice frayed. She stopped. She set her hand against the windowsill behind her as though to steady herself. She began again. You said, "Mind how you go." And then I went into the lift and the doors closed and the lift did not go down. It went sideways. And when the doors opened, she did not finish the sentence. He understood with a cold sliding turn of the stomach what she was telling him. that the lift itself had been the trap, that whoever had taken her had not needed to fetch her from the Department of Mysteries, because the Department of Mysteries had never been her destination at all. that the signature in the ledger had been laid by a man who knew she would never arrive to contradict it, because the lift she had stepped into at his word, "Mind how you go had not been the lift she thought she was stepping into." His hand tightened on the wand. The knuckles went white. He looked down at them as though they belonged to a stranger. "Granger," he said. She did not answer. Granger, I did not know. I have had two years, she said, to consider whether you knew. And she looked at him for a long moment. The gray light through the window moved very slightly as a cloud passed across the rising sun, and the room dimmed and brightened again, and her eyes did not leave his face. "I do not know," she said. "That is the truth. I have constructed every theory of you a person can construct alone in a room for two years. I have made you the architect of it. I have made you a man who saw and did nothing. I have made you a man who did not see. I have made you on the worst nights a man who wept for me in his own bed and who I would forgive everything if he came through that door. I have not been able to settle on any one of these versions of you because I have not had any new information about you since the moment the lift doors closed. She paused and now you are standing in the door. She drew breath. "So tell me, Malfoy, which one are you?" He set the wand down on the small table by the door. He set it down because he understood that for her to be able to hear what he was about to say, his hand had to be empty. He set it down and he stepped into the room. One step no more. Because to come closer than that without permission would have been a kind of violence he had not crossed 2 years and 200 miles to commit. He stood in the center of the small bare room with the gray sea beyond the window behind her and he made himself meet her eyes. I did not know, he said. Not for two years. I have spent two years on this case. I have spent 2 years. His voice caught and he made it go on. I have spent 2 years failing to find you. And I did not know until three mornings ago that the reason I could not find you was that the man I have been reporting to is the man who took you. The signature in the entrance ledger is a forgery. I noticed it by accident. I came here alone by my own decision and no one in the ministry knows where I am. I am telling you this because you have asked and because you deserve every fact I can give you and because I will not lie to you, Granger. Not now. Not about this. Not ever again. The cloud passed across the sun a second time. The light dimmed and brightened. She was looking at him with an expression he still could not read, and her hand was still pressed against the sill behind her. and her knuckles, where they curved over the wooden edge, were as white as his own. Three mornings ago, she said, "Yes, and you came alone." "Yes, why?" He opened his mouth. He closed it. He understood that there was an answer to this question that he had not, even in the small hours on the night train, allowed himself to say. He understood that the answer was the answer he had been carrying for 2 years in the dark below his sternum. The answer he had not had a name for. The answer that had grown in the absence of her in the way certain plants grow. He did not say it. What he said instead was, "Because if I had brought anyone with me, the man who took you would have known by nightfall." She nodded once very slowly. It was not quite acceptance. It was the nod of a woman noting that an answer had been given and that the answer would be examined later. Casius Yaxley, she said. He went still. You know, I have known his face for 2 years. He came here twice. not often enough to be remembered by anyone watching the road and never with anyone else. And he did not come close to me. He stood always in the door of this room. But I saw him and I have spent two years memorizing his face the way some people memorize scripture because I understood very early that the day I got out of this room if such a day came the only currency I would have will be his face in my memory. Did he tell you why? He did not need to. I work I worked in a department whose function is to study certain particular old magics. And I had begun in the three months before he took me to make notes on a line of inquiry that touched on certain old family wards belonging to certain old families. And one of those families was his. He did not need to explain. He took me on the night I would have presented my preliminary findings to my supervisor. The findings, I assume, have not been presented since. They have not. Then he has had what he wanted for 2 years. Yes. She closed her eyes. She stood there for a long moment with her eyes closed and her hand on the sill and the gray light moved over her face. And Draco did not move because the small distance he had crossed into the room felt suddenly like a great distance and he was afraid to add a single inch to it without her permission. Her chest rose fell. Rose again. After some time she opened her eyes. Malfoy. Yes. If I walk out of this cottage with you, what happens? A safe house, not ministry. a house held in a name no one in this country can trace. We stay there until I have built a case against him that cannot be made to disappear. Then we walk into the ministry, you and I, in daylight in front of as many witnesses as can be assembled, and we lay the case on a desk that he cannot reach. And before that, before that you eat and you sleep and you become well and you tell me when you can everything you remember and I do not ask you for anything you cannot give. She looked at him. That is a great deal to promise, Malfoy. I am aware. Are you the man who keeps such promises? I do not know, he said. I have not been before. I would like to be now. That is the best I can tell you. Something moved in her face. The smallest thing. The corner of her mouth did not lift. She did not smile. She was not a woman who would have smiled in that room on that morning. But the set of the muscle there changed by some fractional degree. and he understood that he had said the right thing, that he had said it by accident, that the right thing in that moment had been the absence of a more polished answer. She stepped away from the window. It was a small step. It was the first voluntary movement she had made towards anything but the sea beyond the glass. and he did not know how long and it cost her. He could see the cost of it in the careful placing of her foot, in the slight steadying of her hand against the sill before she released it. But she took it. I have nothing to bring. You do not need to bring anything. I will need to walk slowly. I have not. For some months I have not been. She stopped and a small wash of color came into her face and he understood with a fresh tightening of something in his chest that she was ashamed. Granger, he said very quietly. I will walk at any pace you can manage. We have all day. She nodded. She came across the room to him. She walked slowly as she had said she would. When she reached him, she stopped perhaps 2 feet from where he stood, and she looked up into his face, and the gray light was in her eyes, and the small white scar at her temple was very clear, and he did not move. And she said in a voice almost too quiet for him to hear, "If you are lying to me, Malfoy, I will not survive it. I am telling you that so that you can choose now whether to be lying. I am not lying. Then take me out of this house. He picked up the wand from the table. He held out his other hand to her, palm up, not to take her hand, only to offer the shape of it in case she wanted somewhere to set her own. She looked at the offered palm. She did not take it, but she did not look away from it either. And after a moment, she stepped past him to the door, and she went out onto the landing, and she began with a slow, careful tread of a woman, remembering how stairs were used to descend. And Draco followed her down with a wand in one hand, and the other hand still open at his side. And the door of the cottage stood ahead of them at the foot of the stair, and beyond the door the cold morning, and beyond the morning. He took her to a house in Northland. It belonged on paper to a woman who had been dead for 60 years and whose estate had passed through a sequence of small, careful conveyances into the hands of a Swiss firm that did not exist in any registry Yaxley could reach. Draco had bought it 11 months ago with money from a vault his mother had set aside for him before her death. and he had bought it for no reason he could have named at the time. He had stood at the window of his solicitor's office in Geneva and signed the papers and walked out, and he had not visited the house once, and he had not understood until he carried Hermione Granger across the threshold of it on a wet November afternoon that he had been buying it for her. He did not carry her, of course. She walked she walked the pony track from the cottage to the cove. And she walked from the boat onto the shingle at a small harbor 12 miles up the coast. And she walked from the harbor to the inn where he had left the second pony. And she walked the last quarter mile from where he tied the ponies in a wood to the door of the house. And at the door she stopped and she set her hand against the jam to steady herself and she said, "I will need to sit down for a while now in a voice that was very calm." And he understood that she had used the last of what she had and that the next thing she would do was either sit or fall. He brought her a chair from the hall. She sat on it in the open doorway with the rain beginning to come on behind her and her hands resting on her knees and her eyes closed. And he stood beside her without touching her and said nothing. And after some time she opened her eyes and said, "Show me the house, please." And he did. He showed her the kitchen. He showed her the parlor with the fire he had lit before going north. He showed her the small bedroom on the ground floor he had prepared for her with clean linen and a wardrobe of clothes in the sizes he had guessed badly at her shrunken frame. And she looked at the clothes without expression and she said, "Thank you." in a voice that had nothing in it. And he understood that the thanks was a placeholder, that the real gratitude, if it ever came, would come later, and that the placeholder was the most she could offer now, and was a great deal. He left her at the door of the bedroom. He went into the kitchen and he made soup because soup was what he could think to make. And he brought it to her on a tray and he set it on the small table by the bed and he went out and closed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor with his hand still on the latch and he listened. He did not hear weeping. He did not in fact hear anything for a long time. Then he heard the small sound of a spoon against a bowl and he closed his eyes and he went away. He slept that night in the chair by the pile of fire. He did not sleep well. He woke twice, once at 3, once at 5. And each time he went into the corridor and stood at her door and listened. And each time he heard the slow, regular breathing of a woman in deep, exhausted sleep, and each time he went back to the chair and sat with his hands open on his knees, and watched the fire fail in the great. She slept for 14 hours. When she came out of the bedroom the next morning, she was wearing one of the dresses from the wardrobe, a soft gray wool, the cuffs of which she had folded back twice because the sleeves were too long, and her hair had been combed, and her face had a small new color in it that he understood to be the color of sleep. and she sat down at the kitchen table and let him put tea in front of her and she said, "We should begin." They began. She talked. He wrote. She talked for 3 hours and he filled 14 pages of parchment in the small precise hand he had used at the ministry for 9 years. And when she stopped to rest, he made more tea. And when she could not remember a detail, he did not press her. And when she remembered something that cost her to say it, he set down his quill and waited until she was ready to go on. She told him about the lift. She told him about the room with the sea. She told him about the woman who had brought her meals and never spoken to her. She told him about the visits from Yaxley, the two of them, the way he had stood always in the doorway and asked her in the warm colleial voice he used at briefings. whether she had reconsidered, whether she had decided yet to write out for him in her own hand the precise sequence of incantations she had been about to present to her supervisor on the night he had taken her, and how she had refused every time for 23 months, the refusal becoming over time the only thing in her life that remained entirely hers. I knew she said that the day I gave him what he wanted, he would have no further use for me. So I did not give it to him. It was a very simple calculation. Granger. Yes, that was not a simple calculation. That was the bravest thing I have ever heard a person describe. She looked at him across the kitchen table. The color in her face had deepened slightly. She did not answer. She picked up her tea and she drank and she set the cup down with great care. And after a moment she said in a voice that had a small new tremor in it that the three hours of testimony had not put there. Thank you, Malfoy. It was not the placeholder. It was the other one. He did not trust himself to speak. He looked down at the parchment on the table between them and he capped his ink and he gathered the pages into a stack and he tapped the stack against the wood to align the edges and he said, "I think we have done enough for one morning." She nodded. They settled over the next 10 days into a rhythm. She slept long. She ate more than he had expected, more each day, the color coming back into her face by such slow degrees that he did not notice until the eighth morning, that the bones of her cheeks no longer stood as sharply under her skin as they had when he had first opened the door at the cottage. She walked at first only the length of the hall and then the length of the garden, and by the seventh day to the end of the lane and back. And he walked beside her at the slow pace she could manage, and they did not always speak, and the silences between them had a texture they had not had at the cottage. He brought her books. He had not known which books to bring, and he had brought too many, and the wrong kinds, and she had laughed at him for it. The first sound of her laughter he had heard in two years and one month. A small, dry sound that broke from her before she had decided to allow it, and that she stopped at once, looking at him with a kind of startlement, as though her own throat had betrayed her. He had not laughed back. He had only stood there in the parlor with a stack of wrong books in his arms and looked at her. And after a moment she had said very quietly, "I have not done that in a long time." And he had said, "I know." And she had taken the top book off the stack and opened it and sat down by the fire. and he had gone out into the garden so that she could be alone with a small returned thing inside her chest. On the ninth night, she came into the parlor after he had thought she had gone to bed. He was at the desk by the window with a map of the ministry's lower levels spread out in front of him, planning the route by which they would walk into the building on the day of the reckoning. And the lamp on the desk threw a small warm circle on the map and on his hands, and the rest of the parlor was in the soft red dimness of the dying fire. She came in without speaking in a dressing gown over her night dress, her feet bare on the rug, and she stopped at the end of the desk, and she stood there looking at the map for some time before she spoke. You have not asked me, she said. He set down his quill. Asked you what? You have not asked me how I feel about going back into that building. He looked up at her. The lamp light caught the small white scar at her temple, and it caught the edge of her jaw, and it caught the faint movement in her throat as she swallowed. I have not asked you, he said, because I have been afraid of the answer. The answer is that I am terrified. I know. The answer is also that I will do it. I know that as well. She drew a breath. She set her hand against the edge of the desk. Her fingers were very near his own, where his hand lay flat on the map, and the small distance between them, perhaps 3 in, perhaps four, had a quality of the air that he had not felt in any of the 10 days. A tightening, a held breath, the kind of stillness that comes into a room when something is about to be either said or not said. She did not move her hand. He did not move his. After a long moment, she said very quietly, "Why did you come for me, Malfoy?" He looked at her hand on the edge of the desk. He looked at his own hand on the map. The lamp light pulled around both of them. He understood that the question she was asking him now was not the question she had asked him at the cottage. that the cottage question had been about whether he could be trusted, and that this question was about something else, something he had been carrying for 2 years in the dark below his sternum, something he had still not let himself say in any sentence he had allowed to finish. He let the sentence finish because for two years he said every door in my life has been the wrong door. Every room I have walked into has been the wrong room. I have been a man going about the business of his life with a part of himself missing. And I did not understand what was missing until I sat at my desk three weeks ago and read the official notice of your death. And I understood that what was missing was you. That what had been missing was you for two years. That I had not known you well enough to have earned the right to miss you and had missed you anyway. That I had stood in the corridor and said, "Mind how you go." And watched a lift door close on you. and had not understood until that morning that the door had closed on me as well. He stopped. He had not meant to say so much. He had not meant to say any of it. He sat very still at the desk with his hand on the map and his eyes on her hand at the edge of it. And he did not look up at her face because he was afraid of what her face would be. She did not speak for a long time. Then her hand moved. It moved the small distance between them, 3 in or four, and her fingers came to rest very lightly on the back of his hand, and they stayed there. And the warmth of them went through the back of his hand and up the bones of his wrist and into his chest. And he closed his eyes. And for the first time in two years, and one month, he allowed his shoulders to lower from the place they had been held against his ears. And he sat at the desk with the map under his hand and her fingers on the back of his hand and the lamp light pooling around both of them. and he did not move because to move was to risk the small unbearable warmth lifting away. The reckoning came on a Thursday. They walked into the atrium of the ministry at 10 9 in the morning when the marble floor was at its most crowded and the fountains were running and the great bronze gates between the lifts were open on the press of clarks and junior officials hurrying to their desks. Hermayan wore a long dark coat that he had bought for her in Newcastle, and her hair, which he had cut shorter still, and let dry by the pile of fire that morning, lay neat against her cheek. She walked beside him with her hand inside the crook of his elbow, not for support. She did not need support now, but because it was the way they had decided in the parlor the night before to make the first photograph that anyone took of them tell the truth of where they stood. They were photographed within 4 seconds. A young witch from the prophet on her way to interview someone in the department of magical transportation saw Hermione's face from 20 ft away and stopped walking and stood with her mouth open. And then she fumbled at the bag over her shoulder and brought out a camera and raised it. and the bulb flashed. And the sound of the bulb, small, dry, electric, was the sound that began everything. The atrium did not quiet at once. It quieted in a wave that moved outward from the place where the photograph had been taken. The way water quiets when something heavy has dropped into it and the ripples have begun to reach the shore. Heads turned. Conversations broke off mid word. A man dropped a folder and the parchments inside it slid across the marble in a small white fan and no one bent to pick them up. Within a minute, the atrium of the Ministry of Magic was as silent as Draco had ever heard it. And 300 people were staring at the woman who had been declared dead three weeks ago, walking on the arm of the aura who had failed to find her. Hermione's hand tightened very faintly on his arm. He felt the small tremor in her fingers through the cloth of his sleeve. He did not look at her. He looked straight ahead at the long marble walk to the lifts. And he set his pace to hers. And they walked. They walked through the silence. They walked past the fountain with the golden statues that had been recast after the war. They walked past the security desk where the witch on duty had risen to her feet and was holding a quill in midair. as though she had forgotten what she had been about to do with it. They walked into the central lift, and the gilded grill drew across, and they ascended together to the second floor, where the aura office, and three doors down from it, the office of Cases Yaxley waited. He had not been warned. Bellweather had earned his fee a second time, and the news of Hermione's return had been kept from every channel that touched Yaxley's circle. And when Draco and Hermione walked into the long open room of the Aura office at 9 on that Thursday morning, the first face that turned was a junior or the second was the department heads and the third the third three doors down through the open inner archway was Yaxley's. And Draco watched the warm colleial expression on the man's face begin its slow involuntary slide into something else. And he understood that the case had been made. The arrest took 11 minutes. There were attempts. There were always attempts with men like Yaxley. A half-spoken jurisdictional protest. a glance towards a colleague who did not return it. A hand drifting towards a wand and stopping when it understood that every wand in the room had drifted faster. Bellweather's folder lay on the department head's desk inside Draco's coat, and Quill's sworn statement lay beside it, and Hermione stood by the inner archway and looked at Yaxley with the steady, unblinking attention of a woman who had memorized his face, the way some people memorized scripture. And within 11 minutes, Casius Yaxley walked out of the Ministry of Magic between two auras. And the Wizing received within the hour a sealed petition for his immediate suspension, and the prophet, by the second edition of its afternoon, was running the photograph from the atrium under a headline so large that the type took up half the front page. That was the public part. The private part came later. It came in the early evening after the statements had been given and the rits had been issued and Harry Potter summoned from the aura office by a frantic owl had come stumbling through the door of an interview room and stopped at the sight of her and broken. broken in a way Draco had never seen any man break. Not in the war, not after it, and gone to her on his knees, and held her around the waist with his face pressed against her stomach like a child, and wept without sound for what felt like a quarter of an hour, while she stood with her hand in his hair, and looked over his head at Draco and said nothing because there was nothing to say. The Weasley's came, all of them. Ron came last, alone, because his wife had stayed at home with the new baby, and he stood in the doorway of the room and looked at Hermione. And Hermayan looked at him. And after a long moment, Ron crossed the room and took her in his arms and held her. and Draco stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind him because some things were not his to witness. He stood in the corridor for a long time. He had not eaten. He had not slept properly in 11 days. His hand, when he raised it to push his hair back from his forehead, was shaking. He leaned against the wall of the corridor and closed his eyes. And somewhere very deep inside him, a small unbearable thing was happening that he did not have a name for. And he understood with a kind of distant clarity that the thing happening inside him was the loosening of two years of held muscle. That his body was beginning to put down a weight it had carried for so long, it had forgotten the weight was a thing that could be put down. He breathed. He let his head rest back against the wall. He stood there with his eyes closed and his hand shaking against his thigh, and he did not move. When the door of the interview room opened, he opened his eyes. She came out alone. The others were still inside. He could hear behind her the low murmur of Potter's voice and the deeper murmur of one of the Weasley's. She closed the door softly behind her and she stood in the corridor and looked at him and she said, "Take me home." He took her home. He took her back to the house in Northland. They did not speak on the journey. They apperated to a point outside the village and walked the last mile through a soft cold drizzle that was almost missed. And the lamps in the windows of the house showed yellow through the wet dark long before they reached the gate. and he had thought when he saw the lamps that he had forgotten to put them out, and then remembered that he had left them on deliberately that morning, so that the house would not be dark when they came back to it, and he had not at the time examined why he had wanted that. She went inside ahead of him. He closed the door. He helped her out of her coat. She stood in the hall in the soft gray wool of the dress she had put on at dawn, and her hair was damp at the ends from the drizzle, and she looked tired in a way that was not the tiredness he had seen at the cottage. It was the tiredness of a person who had done a thing and now did not have to do it again. And she said, "I am going to sit by the fire." and she went into the parlor. He went into the kitchen. He put the kettle on. He stood at the kitchen window with his hands flat on the sill and looked out at the dark garden and the drizzle on the glass. And after a while, he heard her behind him in the doorway, and he turned. She was standing in the doorway of the kitchen in the soft gray dress, and her feet were bare, and she had taken her hair out of the pins she had worn at the ministry, and it fell loose around her face, and her eyes in the lamplight were the brown he had carried in his head for 2 years and one month, and they were resting on his face with an expression he had no name for, and the kettle was beginning behind him to make the small first sound of water, learning it was about to boil. She crossed the kitchen. She crossed the kitchen the way she had crossed the bedroom at the cottage on the morning he had opened the door, but she was not slow this time. She came to him and stopped a foot away and she looked up at his face and the lamp light was on her face and the small white scar at her temple was very clear. And she lifted her hand and set it flat against his chest where the buttons of his coat were still done up against the cold. And she said very quietly, "Malfoy, yes. The night before we came down to London. Yes. When you said her voice did not break, but it slowed. The way a hand slows when it is reaching for a thing it is not certain it is permitted to touch. When you said that every door in your life had been the wrong door. Do you remember saying that? I remember. I have been thinking about it. Yes, I have been thinking about it for 10 days. Yes. She drew breath. This is the right door, she said. He did not move. He did not move because to move in that moment was to risk the small unbearable warmth of her palm lifting away from his chest. And he had been a man of small unbearable warmths lifting away from him for 2 years. And he did not. He understood with a kind of clarity that was almost calm, have the resources for another one. So he stayed very still. She lifted her other hand. She set it against the side of his face. The pads of her fingers were cooled from the walk through the drizzle, and they rested against his cheek, and the small touch of them was a thing so unfamiliar to the skin of his face that for a moment he could not breathe. He breathed. He breathed and he lifted his own hand slowly, the way a man lifts a hand towards a wild thing that is chosen against every reasonable instinct to come close. And he set his palm very lightly against the back of her hand where it rested on his cheek, and he closed his eyes. Granger, he said. Yes, I have wanted to say a thing to you for 2 years. Say it. He opened his eyes. He looked at her. The lamp light was warm on her face, and the drizzle was soft on the kitchen window, and the kettle had begun very quietly to whistle on the hob behind him, and he did not turn to lift it from the heat. He looked at her and he said, "I love you. I have loved you for 2 years. I did not know it for most of them. I know it now. That is the thing. That is everything." Her hand on his cheek did not lift. The whistle of the kettle rose behind him into the long thin note of water that has been ready for some time and is waiting to be attended to. And she did not look towards it. And he did not look towards it. And after a long moment in which neither of them moved, she said very quietly, "Take it off the hob, Malfoy." He reached behind him without looking and lifted the kettle from the heat and set it on the cold iron of the stove, and the whistle died in three slow seconds. And the kitchen was quiet again, and her hand was still on his cheek, and his palm was still on the back of her hand. She rose on the balls of her bare feet. She did not hurry. She rose slowly, the way she had walked beside him through the silent atrium that morning. the way a woman moves who has decided a thing and is doing it at the pace of her own decision and not at the pace of anyone else's. And her face came up to his face and she stopped a breath away and her eyes were on his eyes and she waited. He understood with a small last clarity of a man who has reached the end of a long walk that she was waiting for him to choose. He chose. He bent his head and he kissed her. It was a small kiss. It was a quiet kiss. It was the kiss of two people who had walked a great distance to find each other and who understood that the kiss did not need to be more than it was. Because there would be other kisses because they had time now. Because the door at her back was closed and the lamps in the house were lit and the kettle was off the hob and the rain was on the window. and the long terrible work of finding each other was at last finished. When he drew back, her eyes were closed. She opened them. She looked at him. The smallest movement at the corner of her mouth, the movement he had seen for the first time in the bedroom at the cottage, the one that was not quite a smile and was something better than a smile. moved again, and this time she let it become what it had been trying to become, and she smiled at him. He had not in his life been smiled at in that way. He laid his forehead against her. He closed his eyes. He stood in the kitchen of the house in Northland with a woman he had spent two years not knowing he loved. And one month learning how to love rightly. And he held her and she held him. And the rain went on against the window and the lamps burned. and somewhere very far inside his chest a small thing that had been broken for a long time understood at last that it had been mended and the kitchen was warm and the night was theirs and they did not move from where they stood for a long long time. It was a Sunday in late June and the garden behind the house in Northland was full of bees. They had not meant for the garden to become what it had become. In the first spring, she had asked for a row of lavender along the south wall because she had read somewhere that it kept the moths from the linen, and he had ordered the lavender. And then a small thicket of rosemary had followed it because she had wanted something to put in bread. And then the roses had arrived without being asked for at all. Six of them in a flat wooden crate from a nursery in Kent with a card from Pansy Parkinson that said, "Only for your woman, you idiot." And by the second summer, the long bare strip of earth behind the kitchen had become a hedged riot of scent and color that drew bees from three counties and made the back of the house on warm afternoons hum like a struck wire. He sat in a wooden chair by the kitchen door with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow and a cup of tea cooling on the flag stones beside him and he watched her. She was at the far end of the garden kneeling on a folded cloth, her hands deep in the earth at the base of one of the rose bushes. She wore an old linen dress the color of weak tea, and her hair, which she had let grow back over the years, was pinned up off her neck in the careless, halfdecided manner he remembered from a corridor at midnight in another life. There was a smudge of soil on her forearm. There was another on her jaw, where she had pushed back a stray curl with the back of her wrist. She was talking quietly to the rose bush in the absent murmuring way she talked to things she meant to keep alive and the bees moved around her in their slow ordinary commerce and she paid them no mind and they paid her none. He had been watching her for perhaps 10 minutes. He did this sometimes. He had not in the early days allowed himself to do it. Had been afraid that to look at her too long would be to acknowledge in some superstitious corner of himself the possibility that she might at any moment cease to be there to be looked at. And it had taken him the better part of the first year to teach himself that she would still be in the garden if he turned his head away and back again. That the door would still be the right door if he closed it and opened it. That the small daily fact of her was not a thing he had to hold in place by the constant effort of his attention. He had learned slowly, with help, with her patience, which had been the great gift of his life, and with the careful work of his own mending, which had been the second great gift. 3 years and 7 months had passed since the morning he had opened the door at the cottage on the Yorkshire coast. Casius Yaxley had died in Aszcoan in the second winter of a respiratory illness no healer had been able to name. The papers had reported it on a small inner page. Neither of them had attended any service, and neither of them had spoken of it afterwards, except that on the evening the news arrived, she had taken his hand under the kitchen table, and held it for a long time without looking at him, and he had understood that she was not grieving, only setting down at last a small, dark thing she had carried in her pocket for two and a half years. and he had let her set it down in her own time. Harry came for weekends. He came often in the first year and less often as the years went on and as Hermione grew strong again. And as Harry himself began the long, slow work of becoming a man who could sleep through the night, he brought Jinny sometimes. He brought twice a small dark-haired boy with his mother's mouth who had stood in the garden on his second visit and looked up at Draco with grave green eyes and announced with the absolute seriousness of a child of four that he had decided to like him. Draco had been undone by this for the rest of the afternoon in a quiet way that he had not let the boy see. Ron and Luna came at Christmas. They had three children now, and the children ran shrieking through the orchard and broke a pane of glass in the conservatory and ate every biscuit in the house. And Hermione laughed at all of it, laughed in the loose, unbroken way she had relearned over years. And Draco watched her laugh and felt the small, steady mending in his chest go on with its long, quiet work. His mother had come once the spring before she died. She had walked the length of the garden on his arm, and she had stopped at the rose bushes, and she had said, "She has made you a good house, Draco." and he had said, "Yes, mother." And that had been all. She had died in the autumn. Hermayan had sat with him through the night of the funeral without speaking, only her hand on the back of his hand on the arm of his chair, and he had understood that night the full meaning of what she had given him by being alive. He picked up his tea. It was cold. He drank it anyway. She had finished with the rose bush. She sat back on her heels and pushed her hair off her face with the back of her wrist a second time. And she looked across the garden at him and she smiled. The smile that was no longer the rare returned thing it had been in the first months. the smile that had become by the slow accumulation of three and a half years of ordinary days the everyday currency of her face. And she lifted her hand in a small wave. He raised his cup to her. She stood. She brushed the soil from the front of her dress. She crossed the garden to him at the unhurried pace she had always kept. the pace of a woman who had decided long ago that she would not in this life be hurried again. And she came up the two stone steps to the kitchen door and stopped in front of his chair. "You have been watching me," she said. "Yes, for how long?" "A while." She smiled. She bent and she kissed him on the forehead. A small absent kiss. the kiss of a woman whose mouth had become accustomed to the shape of his face. And she straightened and she looked down at him with the late June light on her cheek and she said, "Come and help me with the next bed. The lavender once thinning. In a moment now, Malfoy, in a moment." She laughed. It was a small sound. It was the sound he had first heard in the parlor of the house on the seventh day when he had brought her the wrong books and it was no longer rare and he had not stopped in three and a half years being grateful for the sound of it. She held out her hand. He looked at her hand. He looked at her face. He set down the cup and he took her hand and he stood and she did not let go of his hand as they walked together down the two stone steps and across the warm flagstones into the beehmed garden. And the late June light fell on both of them, and the lavender along the south wall moved very faintly in a small breath of wind off the moore. And somewhere in the house behind them, a clock chimed the hour and neither of them counted the chimes. So that is the end of the story. I want to say thank you for staying with me. Two years is a long time to wait for someone. It is a long time to sit at desk alone with a file you should not have. I wanted to write about that kind of waiting, the quiet kind, the kind no one sees. I love Draco in this story not because he is good. He's not always good, but he tried. He sat with the bottle. He looked at the page one more time and he saw what no one else saw. Sometimes love is just dead looking one more time and Hermione she did not break. She was alone for two year in a one room and she did not give that man what he wanted. That is the bravest scene I know how to write. I did not want a big ending. I did not want fire. I wanted a kitchen, catle, a small keys. Because after everything they lost, I think they earned something quiet, something warm, a garden with bees in it, a hand to hold while their wonder moves in the wind. If you are waiting for someone right now, a person, a feeling, a version of yourself, I hope you find them. I hope the doors open. I hope the light is on the house when you get there. Thank you for listening. Take care of yourself. I will see you in the next