The Anonymous Columnist | Dramione (Harry Potter) Fanfiction

She thought anonymity made her safe. She thought hatred was the sharpest thing she could feel. Then, a letter arrived, unsigned, and a man she had spent 10 paragraphs despising asked her to meet him. Relax and immerse yourself in a love story. The quill had been moving for 3 hours, and Hermione Granger had not noticed the candle burning down to a stub beside her elbow. Her flat in Bloomsbury was the kind of quiet that only existed past midnight in October. The radiators ticking like a slow clock, the windows fogged from the inside, a half-drunk cup of tea gone cold at her wrist. On the desk in front of her lay the thing she had been circling for a week, a sheet of cream parchment headed in her own neat hand, 10 reasons to hate Draco Malfoy. She had written nine of them already. The 10th kept refusing her. She dipped the quill again, watched a bead of ink gather at the tip, and let it fall. It bloomed on the margin like a small black bruise. Reason one, she had written, he cultivates indifference the way other men cultivate gardens, with patience, with cruelty toward anything that grows wild. Reason two, he wears his surname like a coat he keeps meaning to return. Reason three, he has perfected the art of being present in a room without ever entering it. They were not, by any honest measure, fair. That was the point. The column had never been about fairness. The column, her secret, her small weekly treason, had been about the particular pleasure of saying the thing one was not supposed to say under a name that did not belong to her. G. Wren. That was who wrote for Witch's Weekly, a pseudonym she had chosen on a dare from Ginny after two glasses of elf-made wine and a conversation about what exactly the golden girl was permitted to feel in public. The answer had been almost nothing. Gratitude, grace, a polite smile for the photographers on the steps of the Ministry. Nothing with teeth. G. Wren had teeth. For 14 months, G. Wren had been savaging the Wizarding World's most celebrated figures with surgical wit one every fortnight. She had dismantled a Wimborne Wasps Seeker for his vanity. She had eviscerated a Wizengamot judge for his taste in waistcoats and his tendency to rule against Muggle-born plaintiffs. She had even done a Weasley gently for practice, and Charlie had written into the editor to thank G. Wren for finally telling someone about the state of his hair. Nobody knew. Not Harry. Not Ron. Not her mother, who would have been quietly, profoundly horrified. The editor at Witch's Weekly met her twice a year in a private room at the back of a Diagon Alley tea shop and paid her in unmarked Galleons. It was the most honest work she did. And now, tonight, the 10th reason. She rose from the desk and walked to the window. Her reflection hovered there, superimposed on the wet street below, a woman of 24 in a gray cardigan too large for her, hair scraped back from her face, a smudge of ink at her jaw she had not noticed. Somewhere beneath the window, a handsome clattered past, its lamps making halos in the rain. She thought about him. She had not thought about him properly in years. That was the truth she had been avoiding all evening. The reason the 10th reason kept escaping her. Draco Malfoy had been, for the past 4 years, a silhouette at the edge of certain Ministry functions. A name in the financial pages of the Prophet when he endowed a hospital wing, a reconstruction fund, a scholarship for Muggle-born first years at Hogwarts. Always quietly, always with that particular Malfoy economy that managed to turn generosity into a kind of reproach. He did not give interviews. He did not attend galas where he could be photographed. He had married no one. He had defended himself from nothing. This, she realized, was the source of her irritation. He had refused to give the world anything to hate him for, and in doing so, he had made hatred feel unfashionable, which was worse. She returned to the desk, picked up the quill. Reason 10, she wrote, and paused, and then let the sentence come. He has learned that silence, deployed long enough, can be mistaken for virtue, and he is content to let us make that mistake. She set the quill down, read it back, read it back again. It was, she thought, unkind in a way the other nine had not quite been. The other nine had been about his posture, his clothes, his handwriting, his refusal to laugh at his own jokes. The 10th was about something closer to his actual person, and she felt, distantly, the small unpleasant recognition of having crossed [clears throat] a line she had set for herself. She signed the column G. Wren with a flourish and sealed it, and sent it off to the editor by owl before she could take it back. The issue went on sale at 7:00 the following Friday morning. By 8:00, it was sold out at every stockist in Diagon Alley. By 10:00, Witch's Weekly had reprinted. By noon, the reprint was gone. By the evening edition of the Prophet, the column was being quoted, debated, and read aloud in public houses from Edinburgh to Penzance. A wireless program was devoted to it. A shop in Hogsmeade began selling badges that said, Reason 11, None of your business. The editor of Witch's Weekly wept into a tumbler of fire whiskey in her office and sent Hermione a note that said simply, More. Hermione spent the day at the Ministry and tried not to look at anyone. She was aware of the column the way one is aware of a fresh scar under clothing, a private throb visible to no one. In the lift to Witches from the Department of Magical Transportation were reading rival copies and laughing. A junior undersecretary from Magical Law Enforcement caught her eye in the corridor and said, Have you seen it? It's wicked. And Hermione said, I haven't had a moment, and walked very quickly to her office and shut the door. She did not know what she had expected. She had not expected this. It was not until the following morning, a Saturday, that the letter came. She was still in her dressing gown drinking coffee at the little table by the kitchen window when the owl arrived. She did not know the owl. It was a tawny, elegant, older, the kind of bird that belonged to someone with standards. It tapped the glass with the patience of something that had been trained not to hurry. She let it in. It extended its leg. She untied the letter and it left without waiting for a reply, which told her something about the sender before she had even broken the seal. The seal was black wax, no crest, just a thumb mark pressed into the wax where a crest might have been, as if the sender had started to use one and thought better of it. Inside, a single sheet of heavy cream paper, three lines in handwriting she did not know, but immediately understood because it was the handwriting of someone who had been taught to write beautifully as a child and had not forgiven the lesson. You forgot the 11th reason. The Leaky Cauldron. Tonight, 7:00, I'll tell you what it is. No signature. None needed. She stood at the kitchen window with the letter in her hand and the coffee going cold behind her, and she felt, for the first time in a long while, entirely awake. How, she thought, how does he know? She had been so careful. She had used a dead drop owl service in Knockturn Alley that even Ginny did not know about. She had never submitted in her own handwriting. She dictated to a charmed quill that transcribed in a generic clerical script. She had once, as an experiment, told the editor her pseudonym was an anagram and the editor had spent an entire afternoon failing to solve it and had given up, charmed. There was no trail. There was no one who could have told him. And yet, here, on her kitchen table, in handwriting she could already feel she would recognize again anywhere, was the evidence that he knew. She sat down slowly. She thought, "I will not go." She thought this with great conviction for approximately 4 seconds. Then she thought, "He could ruin me with a single letter to the Prophet. He could walk into the Ministry on Monday morning and end my career by lunch. He has not sent that letter. He has sent this one. That is itself a kind of information." Then she thought, and this was the thought she would later pretend she had not had, "He read it. He read every word of it. And the first thing he did was sit down and write to me." She placed the letter face down on the table as if that would help. It did not help. She told herself all day that she was going out of journalistic integrity that if the subject of a column requested a meeting, a serious writer was obliged to attend. That she would bring no quill, take no notes, commit nothing to memory, and leave after 10 minutes. That she would wear something unremarkable. She wore the navy dress, the one with the small covered buttons at the wrist. She had owned it for 2 years and had worn it precisely once to a cousin's wedding and had taken it off in the taxi home. She did not examine this decision. At a quarter to 7:00, she stood in front of her mirror and tried to recognize herself. The woman in the glass had dark eyes, carefully pinned hair, a mouth set in a line she could not quite soften. She thought, "This is absurd. This is a man I have known since I was 11 years old. This is a man who once called me a slur across a corridor. This is a man I owe nothing to, least of all my evening." She thought, "He will be wearing black. He will be at a corner table. He will have my article in front of him and he will have done something to it. Underlined things or written in the margins or folded the corners because he is the kind of man who cannot simply read a thing. He must engage with it, argue with it, dismantle it. He will not stand when I arrive. He will not smile. He will look at me as though he has been waiting and he will be correct that he has been waiting because some part of me has been walking toward this table for longer than I want to know." She caught this thought as one catches a glass falling from a shelf, too late to do anything but feel it go. She put on her coat. The rain had started again, a fine needling thing that silvered the cobbles outside her building. She stepped out into it and the cold took her breath for a moment and she was glad of it, glad to have something ordinary to react to, a weather, a wetness on her cheek that she could name. Charing Cross Road at 7:00 on a Saturday in October was its usual blur of Muggle theatergoers and tired office workers, none of whom looked twice at the narrow grimed window between the bookshop and the record shop. She stopped in front of it. The sign above the door had always been slightly askew. The brass knob was worn smooth in the place where a thousand hands had turned it. Her own hand rose, hovered. She thought with a sudden, absolute clarity, "If I open this door, I am a different woman on the other side of it." Rain ran along the line of her jaw. The pub inside was warm. She could feel the warmth pressing against the old glass. Somewhere within, she knew he was already sitting. He had been early. He would have been early by at least 20 minutes because that was the kind of control he required over rooms he walked into. And he would be sitting with his back to a wall and he would have her article in front of him and he would look up the moment the door opened because he would have been listening for it for 20 minutes. Her fingers closed around the knob. The door gave under her hand with a sound that belonged to another century, the soft protest of old wood against a latch worn thin by decades of palms. Warmth met her face in a wave. The Leaky Cauldron smelled the way it always had, of woodsmoke and pipe tobacco and the faint yeasted sweetness of bread left too long on a hearth. A fire muttered in the grate. A witch in a traveling cloak was arguing quietly with a goblin at the bar. Somewhere behind a screen a fiddle was being tuned by someone with more enthusiasm than ear. She saw him before she had taken three steps. He was exactly where she had known he would be. Corner table, back to the paneled wall, a single tallow candle burning in a pewter dish at his elbow, throwing the bones of his face into relief. He was not reading. He was not pretending to read. He was watching the door and he had been watching it, she understood, since well before 7:00. Draco Malfoy did not rise when she approached. He did, however, do something worse. He folded the magazine in front of him, closed with the same deliberate care a man might use to close the lid of a coffin, and he turned it so that the cover faced her as she crossed the final 3 yards of floorboard between them. Witches Weekly. Her name, the other name, the one she had chosen, printed beneath the title in a font the editor had commissioned especially. G. Wren. Below it, in smaller letters, 10 reasons to hate Draco Malfoy. He was telling her without saying anything that he was not going to pretend. She sat down opposite him because her legs had decided the matter before her pride could. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The candle between them guttered in some small draft she could not locate and the light moved over his jaw, his throat, the pale line of his collar. He had not, she noticed, aged the way other men their age had begun to. He had sharpened. Whatever had been soft in him at 17 had been filed away by something and what remained was clean and exact and very tired around the eyes. He was wearing black. She had known he would be wearing black. It seemed unreasonable somehow that he should also be wearing the precise black she had imagined. Fine wool, high collar, no ornamentation except the narrow silver of a signet ring on his smallest finger, which caught the candlelight when he moved his hand. He spoke first. "You came." Two words. She could not read them. They might have been satisfaction. They might have been surprise. They might, she thought with a flash of irritation, have been both at once, which was the sort of economy a Malfoy considered good manners. "I came," she said, "because I want to know how you found me out." "No, you didn't." He said it without cruelty, almost absently, the way one might correct a child's arithmetic. He reached for his glass, a small tumbler of something amber, untouched, still full, and turned it a quarter of an inch on the wood and did not lift it. "I came," she said again, more carefully, "because I want to know how you found me out." "You came because I wrote to you." His eyes lifted to hers then and she discovered she had forgotten how pale gray could hold so much weight. "If I had written to you asking how you took your tea, you would have come." "That is a different conversation. I will have it with you if you like. But let us not pretend about it. Her hand, under the table, found the small covered button at her left wrist and began to worry it in a slow circle. "You're very sure of yourself." She said. "I am very sure of you." He said. "It is not the same thing." She should, she thought, have stood up then. She should have said something cutting about arrogance and left and written a follow-up column on Monday and let this evening be the anecdote she never told anyone for the rest of her life. She thought about doing it. She even shifted her weight forward slightly as if to rise. He saw it. Of course, he saw it. He did not move to stop her. He simply waited with that terrible Malfoy patience. And after a moment, she settled back into the chair and hated him a little for having been right about that, too. "All right." She said. "Tell me how." He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he reached down beside his chair and brought up a battered leather satchel. Scuffed, not new, not the affectation of wealth she would have expected. And drew from it a second copy of the magazine. This one was creased, thumbed, the cover softened by handling. He laid it on the table between them and opened it to her column. And she saw that he had done exactly what she had pictured in her mirror an hour earlier. And the small vanity of having been correct curdled immediately into something closer to dread. He had marked the article in red ink. Not defacement, not rage, a reader's marks, neat underlinings, small ticks in the margin beside certain phrases. A question mark once beside the word indifference. A single line drawn through one clause and the same clause rewritten above it in his hand in a phrasing she immediately recognized as better than hers had been. She stared at it. "You edited me." She said. "I corrected you." "That is not" "Nine of these." He said, laying a long forefinger on the first reason. "Are accurate, witty, unkind in a way I respect. One of them is wrong. I will tell you which one in a moment if you stay." "And the 11th?" He glanced up. The candle had burned low enough now that a thin curl of smoke rose between them and through it his face looked for a moment not quite solid. "Not tonight." "Then why am I here?" "Because if I had told you in the letter, you would not have come." Her hand tightened on the button at her cuff. She made herself release it. "How did you know?" She said very evenly. "That I wrote it." He looked at her for a beat longer than was comfortable. Then he turned the magazine 90° and pushed it toward her and tapped with the edge of one fingernail the words she had written about silence being mistaken for virtue. "Nobody else." He said. "Writes a sentence like that. You use commas like a woman setting traps. You have done it since you were 12 years old. I read your essay on the Wendelin the Weird Reforms in your fifth year because Slughorn made us all read it. And I read three sentences of G. Wren on the Wimborne Seeker last spring. And I stopped in the middle of Diagon Alley, Granger, in the middle of the street because I knew." He paused, drew breath. His hand left the [clears throat] magazine and returned to the glass, still without lifting it. "I have been reading you." He said. "For 14 months. Every fortnight. I did not always know it was you. I know it now. I have known it since the third column." She did not know what to do with her face. There was a roaring somewhere behind her ears that had nothing to do with the fire or the fiddle or the witch at the bar who had begun to raise her voice at the goblin. 14 months. Every fortnight. He had been reading her. The her that nobody else knew about. The her with teeth for longer than she had been writing in earnest. And he had said nothing. And he had done nothing. And he had carried this knowledge around inside his coat like a folded letter. And tonight, he had opened the coat and let her see it. "Why?" She said. Her voice had gone thinner than she liked. "Why didn't you say?" "Say to whom?" "To me? To the paper? To to the Prophet?" There was something almost like amusement at the corner of his mouth and it did not reach his eyes. "Think, Granger. Think about what you have just said." She thought. She saw, with the sudden cold clarity of a classroom answer arriving too late, what he meant. He could have destroyed her. He could have destroyed her in any of 50 different ways. A quiet word to Skeeter would have done it in an afternoon. A letter to her editor at Witch's Weekly would have done it in an hour. Even a careful remark in the right drawing room would have done it by the end of a weekend. He had done none of these things. He had done nothing for 14 months except read her and mark her. And now, one Saturday night in October, sit across a candle from her and tell her so. "Why not?" She said. It was not quite a question. "Because you were telling the truth." He said. "About everyone. Including, nine times out of 10, me." The fiddler behind the screen had given up tuning and had begun, hesitantly, to play a slow, unfamiliar air in a minor key. Someone at the bar laughed too loud. The draft from the door moved the candle flame sideways and his face shifted with it. "Which reason?" She said. "Which one did I get wrong?" "Not tonight." "You keep saying that." "Yes." "You brought me here on a promise." "I brought you here." He said. And for the first time his voice did something. A small roughening, a catch so faint she might have imagined it. "Because I have been alone with your writing for 14 months and I wanted, once, to be in a room with the woman who did it. I have now been in a room with her for 11 minutes. That will have to be enough for one evening." He stood. He stood the way he did everything, without hurry, without flourish, as if the decision had been made some seconds earlier in a private chamber of his mind and his body was merely catching up. He laid a coin on the table for a drink he had not touched. He did up the single button of his coat. He lifted the marked-up magazine and, after the briefest hesitation, set it back down in front of her. "Keep it." He said. "You may find my notes useful." "Malfoy, I will write to you." He said. "On Wednesday." "I haven't agreed to" "No." He said. "You haven't." And then, because he was who he was, he did the thing that undid her. He looked down at her. Not with triumph, not with the old schoolboy sneer, but with something quieter and more difficult, something that looked almost like apology. And he said very softly so that she had to lean forward to hear him over the fiddle. "Thank you for coming, Granger." He was gone before she could answer. She sat very still at the corner table. The candle had burned down to a knuckle of wax. The fiddler, warming to his minor key, had found the tune at last and was playing it properly now. And the witch at the bar had stopped arguing with the goblin and was crying quietly into a handkerchief instead. And none of it reached her. In front of her, on the scarred wood, lay the magazine. Her article, his red ink. She drew it toward herself with fingers that were not quite steady. And she looked at it properly for the first time. At the ticks, at the underlinings, at the one rewritten sentence. And she saw at the bottom of the page, beneath the last of her 10 reasons, something she had not noticed while he sat across from her. He had drawn a circle in the same red ink around a blank space on the page. An empty circle. No word inside it. No note beside it. A space where an 11th reason might go. Her hand, without her permission, rose to her throat. She did not sleep. She lay on her back in the dark of her bedroom with her hands folded at her sternum, like a figure on a tomb. And she watched the ceiling pale slowly from black to gray to the thin, unconvincing blue of a London dawn. The magazine was in the other room, on the kitchen table, face down. She had put it face down on purpose. And then, at 3:00 in the morning, had got up and turned it face up. And then, at 4:00, had turned it face down again. It was still face down now. She could feel it through the wall. By Monday morning, she had decided, with the brittle certainty of a woman who has argued with herself for 36 hours, that she would not reply to his letter. She would not even open it. She would cast it into the fire unread and go to work and write next week's column about a Gringotts director with a weakness for Fwooper feathers. And in a year, she would barely remember the evening at the corner table. And in five, she would tell the story at a dinner party and laugh about it. On Wednesday, at 4 minutes past 11:00 in the morning, the tawny owl tapped at the window of her Ministry office. She closed the door. She sat down. She broke the seal. Granger, Flourish and Blotts. Closing time. Thursday. The shopkeeper is a friend. He will leave the side door unlocked and the lamp on in the back room. He will not be present. Neither will anyone else. I know how this sounds. Come anyway. D. She read it three times. The third time, her eye caught on the line. I know how this sounds. And something in her chest did a thing she did not have a name for. A small, tight folding, as if a piece of paper inside her had been creased by a hand that knew exactly where to press. I know how this sounds. He had written it because he had known she would think it. He had anticipated her objection and answered it in advance. And he had done so not with argument, but with a flat, unembellished admission that yes, it was precisely as improper as it seemed. And no, he was not going to pretend otherwise. It was the rhetorical equivalent of lifting his hands to show that they were empty. It was also, she realized with a slow, hot clarity that climbed from her collarbone to her hairline, very effective. She wrote back on Ministry parchment with a Ministry quill in her own handwriting. And she made the reply as short as she could. I will come. I am not promising to stay. H. She sent the owl before she could look at the sentence long enough to hate it. Flourish and Blotts, at half past nine on a Thursday evening in October, was a building holding its breath. The main shop was dark. The great front windows had been shuttered from the inside. And the gold lettering on the glass, established 1454, caught only the reflected glow of [clears throat] the street lamp across the way. She went, as instructed, down the narrow passage to the side door. It opened under her hand without complaint. Inside, the air was the precise temperature of old books, cool, dry, faintly vanillic, layered with the quieter scent of beeswax from the floors. A single lamp was burning in the back room. She followed the light. The shop's rear chamber was the one the public never saw. The room where rare editions waited behind glass for collectors, where the owner read his correspondence, where a fire burned small and blue in a grate not much larger than a child's shoe. Draco was standing at the window with his back to her. He did not turn when the floorboard behind the counter creaked under her step. He let her see him first. It was, she understood with a prickle of irritation, a courtesy. He was giving her the half second she needed to compose her face. You're early, he said, still without turning. So are you. Yes. He turned then. He'd taken off his coat. It lay folded over the back of a reading chair with a neatness that spoke of a man who had done it slowly to give his hands something to do. His shirt was white. His sleeves were turned back twice at the cuffs, exposing the pale inside of his forearms. And she made herself not look at the left one. She had spent four years not looking at the left one. She was not going to break that discipline in a bookshop. I wanted to be sure the shop was empty, he said, before you came. That's considerate. It is practical, he said. Considerate is a different word. There was a small, round table in the center of the room, set with two chairs, and [clears throat] between them a decanter she recognized as containing nothing stronger than cordial. He had thought, she realized, about how the room would look to her when she came in. He had thought about what she would not drink. And he had removed the option of having to refuse it. She did not know whether to be touched or unnerved. And settled, as she seemed to keep settling around him, on being both at once. She did not sit. She walked the perimeter of the room instead, trailing one gloved finger along the spines of the shelved books. Agrippa, Bagshot, an early Scamander in its original green binding. And she spoke to the shelves because speaking to the shelves was easier than speaking to his face. You said you would tell me which reason I got wrong. I did say that. Well? A small sound behind her. Not a sigh. A slight shift of weight as he moved from the window to the table and sat down in one of the two chairs. She heard the scrape of its legs. She heard the faint creak of his shirt as he folded his hands on the wood. She did not turn. Reason six, he said. She stopped with her finger on the gold-stamped name, Rowle. Reason six, she said, was that you treat kindness as a transaction. That you never give anything without expecting to be paid for it, in coin or in gratitude or in leverage. Yes. And that's wrong. Yes. Prove it. She heard him draw breath. She heard him release it. She heard, beneath that, the small domestic sounds of a bookshop after hours. The settling of old timbers, the distant tick of a longcase clock in the front room. And she was aware, with an intensity that alarmed her, of the inches of warm air between her shoulder blades and the shelf behind her. I cannot prove it, he said. That is the nature of the error. Anything I offered as proof, you would read as the transaction itself. If I tell you I funded the Muggle-born scholarship anonymously, you will say I did it to purchase forgiveness. If I tell you I have given money to a woman whose husband I helped put in Azkaban and that she does not know it came from me and will never know, you will say I did it to purchase sleep. You would be correct, in a way. But you would also be wrong. A log shifted in the small blue fire. Then what? She said. Am I missing? Turn around, Granger. She did not want to. She turned around. He was sitting at the table with his hands folded in front of him and the lamp at his left shoulder throwing half his face into gold and the other half into something softer. The decanter caught the light between them. His eyes, across the small polished distance of the table, were the color of rain on slate. "Some things," he said, "I do because I cannot bear not to do them. There is no calculation. There is no ledger. There is a child I saw once in Diagon Alley three years ago whose mother was Muggle-born and who was being refused service at a robe shop because of her accent. I paid for the robes. I left before the woman could thank me because I could not stand to be thanked. That is not a transaction, Granger. That is not even kindness. That is a man trying to put down a weight he has been carrying for longer than you know, 1 oz at a time in whatever currency the day gives him." She had, without meaning to, taken a step toward the table. "Sit down," he said quietly, not a command. She sat. The chair opposite his was a little lower than hers, or his was a little higher than hers, or she was imagining the difference. Either way, looking at him across the decanter, she found that their eyes were almost level, and it was she who had to drop her gaze first to the grain of the wood, to pale half-moon of his thumbnail resting against the back of his other hand. "You have been," she said, and found her mouth unexpectedly dry, "paying attention to me." "Yes. For 14 months." "Longer." Her eyes came up. "Longer," she repeated. "The columns were when I knew it was you," he said. "Paying attention to you is an older habit." She did not know what to say to that. She picked up her gloves from the table, not to put them on, simply to have them in her hands. Her thumb pressed into the soft kid of the palm. She noticed that she was doing it and made herself stop. "I want to ask you something," she said. "Ask." "The 11th reason." A flicker in his face, so small that a woman who'd not spent an entire Saturday night thinking about his face would not have seen it. "Not tonight, Granger. You keep I know." "Then when?" He was quiet for a long time. The fire shifted again. Somewhere in the front of the shop a book fell softly from a shelf by itself, the way old books sometimes did in old shops, and the sound was so small and so domestic that she almost laughed. "When I am certain," he said at last, "that telling you will not cost you something I cannot give back." The cordial in the decanter was the color of pomegranate. He lifted it, finally, and poured a shallow measure into each glass and slid one across the table to her. Their fingers did not touch. They did not need to. The glass was cold. She wrapped her hand around it and felt the chill climb into her palm and then into her wrist, and she understood, with a small internal shock that she did not show, that she had not wanted their fingers to touch because she was not yet ready to find out what would happen when they did. "I brought you something," he said. He reached down again to the satchel at his feet. He drew out a small book. It was old, genuinely old, not affectedly so. The spine cracked with use and the corners softened by generations of careless pockets. And he set it on the table between them and turned it so that the title faced her. The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a child's edition. The paper foxed at the edges, the gilding almost entirely rubbed away. "This was my mother's," he said. "She read it to me. I want you to have it." "Malfoy, I am not buying you." His voice was flat. "I know what you were about to say. I am not buying you, Granger. I am giving you a book. You may do anything you like with it. You may throw it in the Thames. I would prefer that you did not, but I recognize that my preference is not your obligation." She looked down at the book. She did not trust herself to touch it. "Why?" she said. "Because you asked me earlier what you were missing, and I cannot tell you in a sentence. But this book, the inscription on the flyleaf, will tell you something about my mother that almost no one living knows. And once you know it, you will know something about me that you did not know before. And then the next time you write me a column, you will either be more accurate or more merciful. Both of those outcomes are acceptable to me." Her hand went, almost against her will, to the book. She did not open it. She laid her palm flat on the cover. The leather was warm from having rested against his side inside the satchel, and the warmth went through her glove into her skin, and she closed her eyes for 1 half second and opened them again before he could see. When she looked up, he was watching her. He had let his mask slip, only for an instant, only by the width of a held breath, but she saw in that instant something she had never seen on the face of Draco Malfoy in 13 years of knowing him, a nakedness so complete it was almost improper to witness, and she felt, absurdly, that she should look away and did not because she could not. Then the mask returned. He reached for his cordial. He did not drink it. "It's late," he said. "The shopkeeper will want to lock up." "He isn't here." "He will be in a quarter of an hour. I told him a quarter of an hour." She stood. He stood. They did not speak as she put the book carefully into the inside pocket of her coat, where it rested against her ribs. At the door of the back room, where the corridor led out to the side street, he paused with his hand on the frame. "Granger." "Yes." He did not look at her. "Read it tonight, not tomorrow. Tonight." "Why?" "Because if you wait until tomorrow," he said, "you will have talked yourself out of it by breakfast." He stepped back to let her pass. Her shoulder, as she went by him in the narrow doorway, brushed the fine wool of his sleeve, the barest half inch of contact, no pressure, no pause, and she felt the small electric fact of it travel from her arm into her throat, and her hand rose to the lapel of her coat as if to hold something in. She did not read it on the walk home. She had intended to. She had planned, as her heels struck the wet pavement of Charing Cross Road, to take it out in the first pool of lamplight she passed and open the flyleaf and have the thing done with before she reached her own front door. The book pressed against her ribs through the lining of her coat, warm from his satchel still, and she kept one gloved hand flat against the outside of the coat as she walked, pressing it to herself as if it might otherwise escape. She did not open it on the walk home. She did not open it in the stairwell of her building. She did not open it when she let herself into the flat and hung up her coat and removed her gloves finger by finger. She did not open it when she filled the kettle or when she stood at the kitchen window watching the rain start again, or when she carried her tea into the sitting room and set it on the low table by the armchair. She opened it at 20 past 11:00 sitting cross-legged on the hearth rug with a fire drawn up to a low red heart because she had finally admitted to herself that she was not going to sleep until she did. The flyleaf was foxed at the edges and inscribed in a hand she did not know, in ink that had gone brown with age, "For my darling N on the eve of her wedding from the mother who loved her before she was named and will love her after I am not here to say so. All stories are true if you read them carefully enough. M." She read it twice. She read it a third time, and she understood with a small cold lift under her sternum what he had meant. The inscription was not from Lucius's family. The M was not a Malfoy. Narcissa Black had been given this book as a girl by her own mother. By a woman who had not, by any public record Hermione had ever read, said a kind word to any of her daughters in her life. Druella Black had been famous in her time for a particular kind of cold social cruelty. Her name appeared in three of the War Crimes Commissions Hermione had worked on, always in the margins, always as the absent parent of a broken child. And here, on the flyleaf of a child's book of fairy tales, in the private hand of a woman the wizarding world had been taught to hate, was a line of love so plain and so unguarded that Hermione had to set the book on the rug for a moment and press the heels of her hands against her eyes. All stories are true if you read them carefully enough. She understood then why he had said she had to read it tonight. He had known exactly what she would do with it if she slept first. She would wake in her own good sense, and she would tell herself that an inscription was only an inscription, and that a mother's cruelty to her public face was not incompatible with a mother's love in private. And that Draco Malfoy was still the boy who had called her a word across a corridor when she was 13. She would have been able to reshelve him in the old cabinet by lunch. He had not given her the chance. She sat on the hearth rug for a long time with the book open across her knees and the fire burning low, and she thought, "You are losing this. You are losing this without a single blow being landed." She did not write to him on Friday. She did not write to him on Saturday. She went on Saturday to tea at the Burrow, and she sat between Ginny and Fleur and ate three pieces of treacle tart she did not taste. And when Ron, across the table, said, "You've gone somewhere, Hermione." She said, "I'm only tired." And Ginny looked at her for a beat too long. On Sunday night, she sat down at her desk to write the next week's column. The editor wanted it by Tuesday. She had six candidates in her file. A Ministry Undersecretary with a weakness for flattery, a professional duelist with three ex-wives, a healer at St. Mungo's who had sold a tell-all memoir, a wandmaker, a Quidditch referee, a minor royal from the Beauxbatons Board of Governors. Any of them would have done. All of them had earned it. She dipped her quill. She wrote the words, "10 Reasons to Hate." She set the quill down. She picked it up again. She tried, "10 Reasons to Avoid." She set the quill down. She stared at the blank parchment until her eyes ached. The truth was very simple, and it had arrived without her permission. She did not want to write about anyone else. She did not want to write about another vain duelist or another acquisitive healer or another silly Undersecretary who thought his tailor was his friend. She wanted to write about the man she had sat across from in a locked bookshop on Thursday night. And she wanted to write about him with the same teeth she had used for 14 months. And she could not because the teeth had been for a man she no longer believed he was. She wrote nothing. She went to bed. She lay awake. On Monday, she sent a note to the editor saying the column would be late. The editor sent back, by return owl, a single word. "Everything all right?" Hermione wrote back, "Yes." And closed her office door and sat at her desk with her hands folded in her lap for 11 minutes before she trusted herself to stand up again. On Wednesday, the owl came again. Not the tawny, a different bird this time. A small, sharp-eyed barn owl she had never seen before, carrying a rolled note no larger than a finger. "Kew Gardens. The Palm House. Sunday at 2:00. Bring nothing. Not even a quill. D." She stared at the word Kew for a full minute before she could make it mean anything. Kew was Muggle. Kew was a place where a man of his name had, by any reasonable reading of his life, no business being. And yet, there it was in his handwriting. And she realized with a slow, warm flush that climbed her throat that he had chosen it precisely because it was Muggle. He was coming onto her ground. He was coming deliberately to a place where none of his people could see him go. And he was telling her, without saying it, that this was no longer about a column. She wrote back, "I will come." She sent it before she could qualify it. Sunday arrived the color of pewter, a low sky, a mean little wind, the last yellow leaves of autumn stuck to the Muggle pavements in wet black patches. She took the Underground from South Kensington because she wanted the ordinariness of it, the shoulder-to-shoulder anonymity of strangers reading newspapers and looking at their own shoes. And when she emerged at Kew Gardens Station, the rain was holding off, but only just. He was already inside the Palm House when she arrived. She saw him from 30 yards away through the great curving ironwork and the wet green glass. And she stopped on the gravel path to let herself look at him before he knew she was looking. He was standing in the central aisle beneath the highest span of the dome, one hand in his coat pocket, the other hanging loose at his side. His head was tipped back. He was looking up at the crowns of the palms, at the enormous prehistoric leaves spread against the glass sky. And his face, without his knowing it was being watched, had gone soft. He looked, she realized with a small lurch, like a man who had forgotten where he was. She went in. The Palm House was a held breath of heat. Damp warmth pressed to her skin. Her hair began immediately to give up its careful pinning at the temples. The air smelled of wet earth and green sap, and the iron smell of old Victorian pipes. She walked up the central aisle, and he turned when she was 10 paces away. And the soft thing she had seen in his face a moment ago tightened, and then, slightly, refused to tighten all the way. "Granger." "Malfoy." They stood a careful yard apart beneath a tree fern the size of a small house. "You came without a quill." He said. "I came without a quill." "Good." He began to walk. She fell in beside him. They went slowly along the aisle and then up the narrow spiral iron staircase at the far end, the one that rose to the catwalk running beneath the glass roof. Halfway up, her hand brushed the banister at the same moment his did. He withdrew his first. She registered the retreat and did not comment. At the top of the staircase, they came out onto the high walkway, level with the crowns of the palms, and the world below them receded to a green cathedral floor. He stopped at the rail. "I brought you here." He said, "because you cannot take notes here. Because you will not want to. Because the light is bad and the air is worse. And anyone who is watching either of us would be a fool to follow us up these stairs." "Is anyone watching either of us?" "Someone is always watching me, Granger. It is one of the 10 reasons. That one I didn't put in the article." "No?" He half-smiled. "You were kinder than you knew." She leaned on the rail. The iron was warm under her palms. Below them, a small Muggle child was being shown a banana plant by a patient grandfather. She watched the child point and the grandfather nod, and she said, without turning her head, "I read the inscription." He did not answer for a long moment. "I thought you might," he said at last, "have." "Your mother," she said. "My mother." "Did she read it to you?" "Every night," he said, "until I was nine, and then on my birthdays until I was 13, and then once when I was 17 after she had not read it to me in 4 years, she came into my room in the middle of the night and sat on the edge of my bed and read me The Warlock's Hairy Heart. I did not know why at the time. I know now." Hermione's hand tightened on the rail. She did not ask. She did not have to. The Warlock's Hairy Heart was the story of a man who had cut out his own capacity for love, sealed it away to keep himself safe, and had discovered, when he tried at last to put it back, that what he had preserved had become a shrunken, brutal thing that destroyed him and the woman he had wanted to love. Narcissa Malfoy had read it to her 17-year-old son in the summer of 1997. She had read it to him, Hermione understood, as a warning. "She was trying," Hermione said quietly, "to tell you something." "Yes." "Did you listen?" He was a long time answering. "Not in time," he said, "not in time to spare her what came next. Not in time to spare." He stopped. His throat moved. He turned his face away from her, out over the green drop below, and when he spoke again, his voice was so level that she understood the cost of the leveling. "I listened afterward, Granger. I have been listening afterward for a very long time." She did not look at him. She could not without doing something she was not yet prepared to do. She looked, instead, at his hand on the rail, at the narrow silver signet on his smallest finger, at the fine bones of the wrist, at the pale inside of his forearm disappearing into the white cuff of his shirt. "Why are you telling me this?" she said. "Because you asked me what you were missing." "I asked you a week ago." "Yes." "And you are telling me now." "Yes." "Why now?" He turned his head. She felt him turn it. She did not turn hers. "Because," he said, "if I tell you the 11th reason next week or the week after or the week after that, I do not want it to be a surprise. I want it to be the last sentence of a story you have been reading for some time. I want you to know when I say it that I did not arrive at it in a moment. I want you to know that you have been read, Granger, and read carefully by [snorts] a man who is not accustomed to reading anyone carefully for longer than you have known you were being read. I want you to know all of this before I say anything else, because afterward, I will not be in a position to explain it." Her hand on the rail was trembling very slightly. She watched it tremble as though it belonged to someone else. "Malfoy," she said. "Granger, if you tell me the 11th reason," she stopped, started again, "if you tell me, I will not be able to write about you again, ever, under any name." "I know." "The column I know, Granger. It is the only She shut her mouth on the sentence. She had been about to say, "It is the only place I'm allowed to be unkind." She did not say it, but she heard herself almost say it, and she heard him hear her almost say it, and the air on the high walkway thickened around them like warm water. He lifted his hand from the rail. He did not reach for her. He lifted his hand, instead, to the narrow space between them on the iron, and he let it rest there, palm up, open, empty, an offering made without pressure, a gesture that asked for nothing and would accept anything. She looked at his palm. She looked at his face. Somewhere below them, the Muggle child laughed at something the grandfather had said, a high, bright sound through the green. Her hand began, very slowly, to leave the rail. She did not take his hand. Her fingers came up off the iron rail and hung for one suspended second in the warm, damp air of the Palm House, and then she drew them back, folded them around her own opposite wrist, and held herself together with the same grip she had used on the doorknob of the Leaky Cauldron 9 days before. He did not close his hand. He did not withdraw it abruptly, either. He let it rest, palm up, in the space between them for what felt like a long time, and then, >> [clears throat] >> without hurry, without wounded pride, he turned it over and laid it flat on the rail again. The retreat was so graceful, it was almost unbearable. "I'm not saying no," she said. Her voice came out lower than she had meant it to. "I know." "I'm saying I I know, Granger." She closed her eyes for one beat. The damp of the Palm House was on her eyelids. "I need," she said, "to go home." "Yes." "Alone." "Yes." He walked her to the top of the iron staircase and no further. She understood, without needing to be told, that he was staying behind because he did not want anyone, not a Muggle grandfather, not a passing groundsman, not any stray eye at all, to see them leave the Palm House together. He was protecting her in the only way he knew how, which was by absenting himself from the photograph. She nodded to him once at the head of the stairs. He inclined his head. She went down alone. She did not look back from the bottom. She did not need to. She could feel him standing at the rail, watching, until she was out through the great iron doors and onto the gravel path and lost in the ordinary Muggle Sunday of prams and newspapers and couples arguing quietly about tea. She found out on Tuesday morning. The Prophet arrived at her window at 7:00, as it always did. She was standing at the stove in her dressing gown, watching a pan of water come to the boil, and when she turned to take the paper from the owl, she saw, above the fold, in a point size reserved for election results and royal funerals, the two words she had spent 14 months ensuring no one would ever put together. Hermione Granger, and beneath them, in only slightly smaller letters, is G. Wren. The kettle screamed behind her, and she did not hear it for several seconds. She read the article standing up because she could not remember how to sit. The byline was Rita Skeeter. Of course, it was Rita Skeeter. The piece was long, and it was lovingly venomous, and it had been written, Hermione could tell from the third paragraph, by someone who had been sitting on the information for at least a week and polishing every phrase. There were quotes from the editor of Witch's Weekly, denials, furious and unconvincing. There was a reproduction of the Malfoy column in full, with certain sentences underlined in a red that was clearly meant to echo a certain other red. There was a photograph of Hermione at a Ministry function from the previous spring, laughing at something Kingsley had said, and beneath it the caption, The Face Behind the Knives. There were also, and this was the part that stopped her breath, three paragraphs of speculation about why the war heroine had turned to anonymous satire. Rita Skeeter had a theory. Rita Skeeter had several theories. Rita Skeeter wondered in print whether the golden girl was bitter, whether she was bored, whether she had been passed over for a promotion, whether she had been left Ronald Weasley more acrimoniously than had been reported at the time. And then, in the last paragraph, Rita Skeeter wondered something else. Rita Skeeter wondered whether it was a coincidence that the most savage column of G. Wren's career had been about one Draco Malfoy, and whether it was a further coincidence that the aforementioned Mr. Malfoy had been seen by an observant citizen whom Rita Skeeter was not at liberty to name leaving the Leaky Cauldron not 2 hours before Miss Granger entered it alone on the evening of the 11th. The kettle was still screaming. She crossed the kitchen and turned off the flame. She sat down. She set the paper in front of her. She read the last paragraph again. An observant citizen, a waiter, a passerby, a witch at the bar who had been pretending to cry into a handkerchief. It did not matter which. What mattered was that someone had seen her and had taken the trouble to remember and had sold the memory to Rita Skeeter for what Hermione presumed was a perfectly good sum of Galleons. And the everything she had built for 14 months was finished before her coffee had boiled. She did not cry. She noticed herself not crying. And she noticed that the not crying was not composure. It was the body refusing to catch up to what had happened. The first owl arrived at 10 past 7. It was Harry's. Hermione, what the hell? Call on me as soon as you can. Not angry, worried. H. The second was Ginny's. Come round whenever. No questions. Kettle on. The third was her editor at Witch's Weekly. Do not come in. Do not write anything. Do not answer the door. We will talk tomorrow. The fourth was Ron's. She did not open it. She could see through the paper the density of the handwriting, the tight furious slope of the loops. She set it face down on the table and weighed it with a salt cellar and walked away from it. The fifth owl came at a quarter to 8. It was the tawny. She knew it was the tawny before she saw it, knew it by the particular unhurried tap at the window, by the patient lift of the leg, by the way it did not wait for a reply. She untied the note. The bird was gone before she had broken the seal. Three lines again. No signature. Do not go to the Ministry today. Do not open your door to anyone you do not love. I will come at 9. She read it three times. She laid the note flat on the table beside Ron's unopened letter, and she sat down in her kitchen chair, and this time the not crying broke, and she cried properly for perhaps 90 seconds, hands over her face, shoulders shaking once, and then she stopped because she had always been able to stop. She got up and went to wash her face and put on something other than a dressing gown because whatever else happened today, Draco Malfoy was not going to find her in her nightclothes when he came through her door. The rain began again at half past 8. By a quarter to 9, it was serious rain, the kind of October downpour that turned London gutters into small rivers and drove even the most determined Muggle commuters into doorways to wait it out. She stood at her sitting room window and watched it slick the plane trees on the square, and she tried to think and found that she could not quite. So, she gave up and simply watched the rain. At 3 minutes past 9, there was a knock on her door. She knew the knock before she reached the door. It was a knock composed entirely of restraint, two measured strikes with a second knuckle, neither loud enough to alarm a neighbor nor soft enough to be mistaken for uncertainty. She turned the latch. She opened the door. He was soaked. He had not cast a charm against the rain. He had walked from wherever he had come from through the full weather of a London October, and his hair was darkened with it and pushed back from his forehead. His coat was black with wet, and water was running down the line of his jaw and dripping one slow drop at a time from the cuff of his sleeve onto her hall carpet. He had not, she saw, slept either. Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Then he said very quietly, "May I come in?" "Yes." He came in. She closed the door behind him. She did not lock it. And then she turned, and she did lock it, and she felt him notice the small second gesture and not comment on it. He stood in her hall dripping onto the boards. "Your coat," she said. "Yes." She helped him out of it. She had not helped a man out of a coat in 2 years, and the motion came back to her hands without permission. The lifting away from the shoulders, the turning of the lapels to let the arms slide free. The wool was heavy with water. She hung it over the back of a kitchen chair because her coat rack would not have borne it. Beneath the coat, he was wearing a white shirt that had gone translucent in patches across the shoulders, and she made herself look at his face and only at his face. His face was worse than she had prepared for. He was holding it together. He was Draco Malfoy, and he was holding his face together the way he held everything else together by long and punishing habit. But the holding was audible this morning. There was a faint tremor along his jaw that he had not yet succeeded in suppressing. There was a whiteness about his mouth. His eyes, when they came to hers, had in them a quality she had never seen in them before, not in 13 years, not even on the high walkway of the Palm House. He was frightened. He was frightened, and he had come anyway. "Did you," he began. "I read it." "All of it." "All of it." "Granger." "Don't." The word came out sharper than she had meant. He stopped at once. She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead and made herself breathe in and out and in. "Don't apologize for her," she said. "Don't apologize for Skeeter, and don't apologize for being in the article, and don't apologize for being seen leaving the Leaky Cauldron. None of this is your fault. If you apologize for it, I will." She stopped. She did not know what she would do. She did not want to find out. "I was not going to apologize," he said. "Good." "I was going to ask if you were all right." "No." "No, you are not all right." "No." He stood in the middle of her kitchen with his wet hair and his wet shirt and his hands hanging empty at his sides, and he did not come any closer. "Tell me what you need," he said. "I don't." "Granger." "Tell me what you need." "I will go if you need me to go. I will stay if you need me to stay. I will write a letter to the Prophet by lunchtime if you need me to write a letter to the Prophet by lunchtime. I came here because I did not want you to be alone with this. If being alone with this is what you want, I will leave now, and you will not hear from me again unless you ask." "Don't." She shut her mouth. She had almost said, "Don't go." The two small words had been at the front of her teeth, and she had bitten them back, and he had watched her bite them back, and she saw his throat move as he swallowed. "Stay," she said. It came out as a whisper. "Yes," he said. He did not move toward her. He stayed precisely where he was in the middle of her kitchen floor, rainwater darkening the boards at his feet, and he waited for her to be the one to close the distance because he had understood somewhere between the Palm House and the front door that she was going to need to be the one who did. She did not close it yet. She stepped back instead toward the sitting room. And she said over her shoulder, not looking at him, "Come in. Sit down. I'll light the fire." She heard him follow. She heard him stop once, just inside the sitting room doorway, as if to give her a final chance to change her mind. She did not change her mind. She knelt at the grate with her back to him. And she struck a match for the kindling. And her hand, when she held it to the flame, was almost steady. The fire took slowly. She stayed on her knees at the hearth longer than she needed to, feeding in small sticks of applewood, and watching them catch, because kneeling gave her hands something to do, and turned her face away from his. Behind her, she heard him settle, not on the sofa, which would have been too near, but in the small upright chair by the window, which was the furthest seat from the fire. He had chosen it, she understood, deliberately. He was giving her the whole rest of the room. When the fire had begun to throw proper heat, she sat back on her heels, and then, carefully, got to her feet. She did not turn on the lamps. The gray light of the wet morning came in through the window behind him in a soft, unfocused wash. And the firelight took up the rest. And the sitting room had that underwater quality that belonged to rooms lit by weather. She went into the kitchen for the tea she did not especially want, and came back with two cups, and set one on the little table beside his chair, and took her own to the end of the sofa nearest the fire. He did not touch the tea. Neither did she. They sat in silence for what must have been 5 minutes. Outside, the rain changed its mind twice, softening to a hiss, thickening again to a drumming on the sash. And somewhere in the square, a motorcar went past very slowly with its wipers working. The small, ordinary sounds of an ordinary London morning carried on without her, as if the paper on her kitchen table did not exist. He spoke first. He spoke to the fire, not to her. "When I was 12," he said, "my mother took me to Paris." She turned her head. "We went," he said, "without my father. He did not know we had gone. She took me to a gallery on the Rue de Seine, because she said I ought to see a particular painting before the winter. And she bought me a cup of chocolate at a cafe where the proprietor was Muggle-born and did not know who she was. She let him serve her. She thanked him in French. On the way back to the hotel, she bent down on the pavement and re-tied my scarf, although my scarf did not need re-tying. And she said to me, very quietly, "Draco, the world is larger than your father tells you. Remember that I told you this on a pavement in Paris." He paused. His hand, resting on the arm of the chair, turned over once. "I was 12," he said. "I remembered. I did not understand, but I remembered. I have remembered every week of my life since." Hermione did not speak. "I am telling you this," he said, "because I want you to know that what happened to me afterward was not the whole story. I was not only the boy in the corridor who called you the word. I was also, already, the boy on the pavement in Paris whose mother was bending down to tell him the truth about his father. Both boys were in the corridor. One of them was louder than the other. That is not an excuse. It is a correction." She set her tea down on the low table very carefully. "Why are you telling me this now?" she said. "Because today you will read in the paper, and tomorrow you will read in a worse paper, a version of me that is not complicated. I wanted you to have the complication before the flattening." "Malfoy, I am not finished, Granger." She closed her mouth. He turned his head at last and looked at her. "Skeeter will write," he said, "that I seduced you. She will not use the word. She will use other words. She will imply that I have been courting you to silence you, or to humiliate you, or to avenge some old schoolboy grievance. She will suggest that a war heroine has been taken in by the son of a Death Eater. Every paper that is not ours, and none of them are ours, will repeat it in some form by the end of the week. I want you to know now, in this room, before any of that is printed, what the truth is. I want you to hear it from me, in my own voice, so that when you read the lie, you will know it is a lie. And you will not have to wonder, in any private hour, whether some part of it is not." "Tell me," she said. Her voice did not sound like her own voice. He was quiet for a long moment. The fire popped. A piece of applewood shifted in the grate, and a small shower of sparks went up the chimney and was gone. "The 11th reason," he said. She stopped breathing. "Is that I have loved you," he said, "since I was 19 years old, in a courtroom in the spring of 1999, when you stood up for my mother in the witness box and did not have to. I watched you from the defendant's bench, and I understood something I had not understood before, which was that I had been taught my whole life to recognize power in people who made rooms smaller, and that I had never, until that afternoon, seen what power looked like in a person who made a room larger. You made that room larger, Granger. You made it larger for my mother, who did not deserve it, and for me, who deserved it less. I walked out of that courtroom a different man. And I have been that man ever since. And I have not told anyone living what made me into him." His voice had not risen. His voice had not changed at all. He had said the whole thing in the same level tone he had used at the Leaky Cauldron, and in the bookshop, and at Q. And because of this, because he had refused, even now, to perform it, it landed in her chest like something very heavy set down very gently on glass. She did not speak. "I did not come near you," he said, "for 6 years. I did not write to you. I did not engineer meetings. I did nothing to put myself in your path, because I knew that what I felt was my problem, and not yours, and because I did not want you to have to be kind to me about it. I read the Prophet to know what you were doing. I read your essays in the Wizengamot Bulletins. I read, 14 months ago, a column in a magazine I did not ordinarily buy, and I knew three sentences in that it was you. I have read every column since. I have read your Malfoy column, Granger, 41 times. I know it by heart. I am reciting it to myself now to keep my hands still." She looked at his hands. They were still. They were too still. They were the stillness of a man exercising every particle of self-command he possessed. And she understood, with a clarity that did something to her throat, that he had rehearsed none of this, and that he was saying it now because today was the day it could no longer be unsaid, because Rita Skeeter had turned tomorrow into a country he could not follow her into without "I am not asking you," he said, "for anything. I want to be very clear about that. I am not here to be answered. I am here because I did not want the lie in the paper to arrive in your house before the truth did. If, in an hour, you ask me to leave, and to never write to you again, I will leave, and I will never write to you again. And you will have done me no wrong. You owe me nothing, Granger. You have never owed me anything. That is part of what I love about you, and it is the part I find hardest to bear. He stopped. He had said the word. He had said it plainly without ornament in her sitting room in the middle of a Tuesday morning in October with the rain on the window and his hair drying into its old pale color and his untouched tea cooling at his elbow. He had said it and he had not made her catch him saying it and he had not put it in a letter and he had not engineered a moonlit garden. He had said it over the disaster of her morning because the disaster of her morning had left no decent time for it and indecent time was the only time he had. She put her hands over her face. She did not cry. She put her hands over her face because she needed for 5 seconds not to be looked at. And he let her have the 5 seconds without speaking without moving without drawing a single breath she could hear. When she took her hands away he was looking into the fire again. He had given her back her face. Draco. She said. It was the first time she had ever called him by his given name. She saw him receive it. She saw the small involuntary closing of his eyes the fractional tightening of his jaw the single controlled inhalation through the nose. He did not turn his head yet. He was giving himself, she understood, a moment to be equal to it. Yes. He said. Come here. He turned his head. Granger. Come here. He rose. He crossed the sitting room floor four slow steps on the boards and then two more on the rug. He stopped in front of the sofa at a distance she could have crossed by leaning forward and he waited. He did not sit. He did not reach. He was giving her still in this last small matter the entire decision. She reached up. She put her hand flat against the front of his shirt. The linen was cool with rain still. Under her palm his heart was doing something she had not expected. Not the hammering of a boy caught out but a slow hard knocking. The steady insistence of a thing that had been knocking for a very long time and had stopped being surprised by the sound of itself. I can't. She said. Her voice was shaking. I can't write about you anymore. I know. I don't know who I am without the column. You are the woman whose hand is on my chest. He said. Start there. She laughed. It came out as a half sob. He did not smile. His eyes above her had gone very dark. Draco. She said again because she wanted to find out a second time what happened to him when she said it. It happened again. The small closing of the eyes the tightening of the jaw. Granger. He said. Hermione. Hermione. He said her name as though he had been saving it. He said it as though he had been saving it for years as though the syllables had been folded in the inside pocket of his coat the whole time rubbed smooth with handling and were now being taken out and laid on a table between them for the first time in open light. She did not kiss him. She pulled him down by the handful of linen she had in her fist until he was sitting on the edge of the sofa beside her close enough that their knees touched through the wool of his trousers and the cotton of her skirt. And then with a care that surprised her she laid her forehead against his shoulder. His shoulder was still damp from the rain. His arm came up very slowly and settled after some hesitation along her back. Not drawing her in not possessive only present. And she felt the weight of his hand between her shoulder blades and she closed her eyes and she stayed there. They did not speak for a long time. The fire burned. The rain came and went. At some point the tea on the table beside him went entirely cold and neither of them noticed and neither of them cared. His hand between her shoulder blades did not move. Her forehead on his shoulder did not move. It was not an embrace exactly. It was a truce. It was the small domestic armistice of two people who had been at war with a great many things including each other including themselves and who had agreed in the dim firelight of a ruined Tuesday morning to put the weapons down on the floor between them and look at what they had been holding. Stay. She said eventually into the damp of his shirt. Until the fire goes out at least. Yes. Longer if the fire keeps going. Yes. His hand between her shoulder blades pressed once the faintest acknowledgement the smallest possible yes and then was still again. He left before the rain stopped. He stayed through the burning of two logs and the cooling of their untouched tea and the slow arrival of noon. And when at last he rose from the sofa he did it the way he did everything without hurry as if the decision had been made by some quieter part of him an hour earlier and his body had only now caught up. She did not ask him to stay longer. He did not offer. They had found between them the shape of a leaving that was not a retreat and they were both careful now not to break it. At the door he took her hand. It was the first time. He took it the way a man might take a letter he had written and decided not to send gently with a small astonished care as if it surprised him to find himself holding it. And he turned it over and laid his mouth once briefly against the inside of her wrist precisely where the small covered button of her navy dress had sat on the evening of the Leaky Cauldron. She had not been wearing the dress today. He remembered the button anyway. She understood with a small hot flicker under her breastbone that he had been cataloging her for longer than she had let herself think. He did not kiss her mouth. He went out into the wet street and she stood in the open doorway watching him go and he did not look back because looking back was a thing he had learned somewhere in his bad education not to do. She closed the door. She leaned her forehead against it for perhaps 10 seconds. Then she went and burned Ron's unopened letter in the sitting room fire because she did not want to read it and because she did not want to discover one evening in a month's time that she still had not read it. She stood over the grate and watched the wax of the seal go first then the edges of the paper then the whole thing curl inward into a small black flower. When there was nothing left she went back into the kitchen and put the kettle on properly this time and made herself a piece of toast she did not want. And she ate half of it standing at the window and she thought now what? The answer was four days of silence not between them. They wrote twice brief notes that said almost nothing and meant a great deal. I am well. She wrote. Harry has been kind. Ginny has been Ginny. The Ministry has placed me on special leave which is a polite word for hidden. I am reading a book about the rebuilding of the Alhambra. It was your mother's book, wasn't it? H. And he wrote back by the same tawny owl. It was. Keep it for now. Do not come to the manor yet. I will tell you when. D. The silence she meant was the one the wizarding world kept around her. It was not the silence she had expected. She had prepared herself that Tuesday morning for public evisceration for a week of follow-up columns in the prophet for angry letters from strangers for being shouted at in Diagon Alley by people who had bought her a drink at a victory party 6 years earlier. None of this happened. Something stranger happened instead. The Prophet ran its headline on Tuesday and its follow-up on Wednesday. And on Thursday morning a letter appeared in its correspondence column, unsigned, from a witch who identified herself only as a reader in Devon. The letter said in three short paragraphs that she had bought every issue of Witch's Weekly for 14 months. That she had laughed at the Wimborne Seeker column until her husband had become concerned for her. That she had cut the Wizengamot judges column out and pinned it to her larder door. And that if Hermione Granger had been the author then Hermione Granger had been doing the wizarding world a small weekly service that Hermione Granger had every right to perform under any name she chose. The letter closed with a line. We expected her to be a saint. She refused. Good. A second letter on Friday from a wizard in Cornwall agreed. A third on Saturday from a pair of sisters in Edinburgh went further. By Sunday evening the Prophet had received, it was rumored, more than 400 letters on the matter. And roughly 370 of them were from people whose feelings about Hermione Granger had not cooled and had possibly warmed. It had not occurred to Rita Skeeter or to the Prophet or honestly to Hermione herself that the wizarding public might have been rather tired of being asked to revere her. And rather pleased to discover that she had a sharp tongue and had been using it on people who deserved it. The editor of Witch's Weekly wrote to her on Sunday night. They are asking when the next column comes out. I have told them you are on sabbatical. You are not obliged to write another word for me. But if you ever wish to, the door is open under whatever name you like, including your own. Hermione read the letter twice and folded it and put it in the drawer where she kept the things she was not yet ready to decide about. On Monday evening at half past seven there was a knock on her door that was not his. She knew it was not his before she reached the door. It was too loud, too uncertain. And it was followed by a second knock before she had made it down the corridor. Which Draco Malfoy on his very worst morning had not done. She opened the door. Harry was standing on the step. Can I come in? He said. Yes. He came in. He was wearing the old jacket he wore when he did not want to be noticed. And he sat down at her kitchen table without being asked. And he did not speak for a minute. She put the kettle on because she did not know what else to do with her hands. And when she turned around he was looking at the little leather book on her counter. Narcissa's Beedle the Bard. Which she had not yet managed to put on a shelf. That's his, isn't it? He said. It was his mother's. He gave it to me. Right. The kettle clicked. She poured. She sat down opposite him. He wrapped both hands around his cup and did not drink. I came. He said. To tell you that I am not angry with you. Ginny said I should say that first and she was right. I am not angry with you. I do not understand you at the moment. But that is a different thing. Harry. Let me finish. She let him finish. I came. He said. Also to tell you that Ron is going to be all right. He's not all right yet. He may not be all right for a while. But he is going to be. Ginny has been very clear with him. So have I. He understands that what he had with you was over two years ago. And that nothing about it is owed to him now. He will not, I think, write to you again. I am sorry about the letter. I didn't read it. Good. Harry almost smiled. Neither did I. He showed me the draft. It was not his best work. She surprised herself by laughing. It was small and watery. But it was a laugh. Harry looked up at the sound of it. And his face shifted. And for a moment he was not the head aura or the boy who lived or the oldest friend she had in the world. He was a 24-year-old man sitting in her kitchen. Tired, out of his depth, doing his best. Hermione. He said. Yes. Is he He stopped. He tried again. Is he being good to you? She thought about it properly before she answered. She thought about the palm house and the warmth of his hand on her back through the wet of his shirt. And the stillness with which he had sat in the upright chair by the window giving her the whole rest of the room. Yes. She said. He is being unbearably good to me. Unbearably? Yes. Harry nodded slowly as if this was an answer he had not expected but could work with. I don't like him. He said. I am not going to pretend to like him. I may never like him. But I am not going to be the reason you don't have this. If this is what you want. I have watched you be careful for everyone in your life for 14 years, Hermione. And if the one thing you are not careful about turns out to be a Malfoy then fine. Fine. I will learn to say hello to him without putting my hand on my wand. I can't promise more than that yet. That is, she said, more than I had any right to ask. You didn't ask. He finished his tea. That is why. He stood up. At the door he paused. There's a Ministry gala on Thursday. He said. The reconstruction anniversary thing. Kingsley wants you to come. He says it will put a stop to the last of Skeeter if you walk in on your own two feet. Ginny agrees. I agree. But I was overruled into telling you gently. Will he be there? Harry did not need to ask which he. He has not attended a Ministry function in three years, Hermione. He was invited as a donor. He has already sent his regrets. Harry paused. Ginny is of the opinion that if he hears you are going he will change his mind. Ginny is often right. Hermione did not answer. Harry at the door did something she had not expected. He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. Briefly. The way he had done when they were 17 and hiding in a tent in the middle of winter. And she had been crying about Ron. Wear the green one. He said. Ginny says. He left. She wore the green one. It was a dress Ginny had bullied her into buying the previous spring. And which she had never taken out of its tissue paper. A deep, almost black green. The color of yew needles. Long sleeved, high at the throat. Cut close through the bodice and falling away at the hip. She had refused it the first time she had tried it on because it had made her feel standing in the shop mirror like a woman who was about to do something she had not planned to do. She put it on Thursday evening without hesitation. The reconstruction gala was held in the restored atrium of the Ministry. The fountain had been rebuilt. The floor had been re-laid in the original black marble. 1,500 candles hung in the air beneath the vaulted ceiling. And the light they threw had the particular gold quality of a room that had been mourned into existence. She walked in on her own two feet as Kingsley had wanted. The room did not quiet. It did something more useful than quiet. It noticed and then it pretended, politely, that it had not. And a small warm ripple of attention went ahead of her as she moved through the crowd. Kingsley embraced her at the foot of the staircase. An elderly witch she did not know squeezed her hand as she passed and said Good for you, dear. A junior aura pressed a glass of champagne into her hand without being asked. Ginny found her at the third column from the east wall and kissed her cheek and said, "Without preamble, he's here. 10 minutes ago. Far end by the window." He has not looked away from the door since he came in. Hermione did not turn her head. She stood, champagne in one hand, the other resting lightly on the marble column. And she let herself breathe for a slow three counts. And then she turned her head. He was standing at the far end of the atrium by one of the tall restored windows. He was in black as he had always been in black. He was not speaking to anyone. He had a glass in his hand that he was not drinking. And across the full length of the restored hall, over the heads of the Minister and the Wizengamot and the assembled press and the 1,500 suspended candles, his eyes found hers and did not move. She did not go to him. He did not come to her. They stood at opposite ends of the room for perhaps 40 minutes and they did not speak and they did not gesture and they did not by any measurable standard so much as acknowledge each other. And every person in the room every reporter, every photographer, every old schoolfellow, every Ministry official understood without being told exactly what they were looking at. At 10:00 precisely, Hermione set her empty glass down on a passing tray. She walked the length of the atrium. The walk took longer than any walk she had ever taken. The floor was black marble and her heels sounded on it. And though the orchestra kept playing and the hundred conversations in the atrium went on she was aware with the clarity of a woman moving through water that every face she passed turned very slightly toward her as she went by and then very slightly away again to preserve the decency of the thing. Kingsley stepped quietly out of her path without looking at her. A photographer near the east column lowered his camera and did not raise it. Ginny, at the foot of the staircase, did not watch her go. It was Ginny's way of being loudest. He did not move. He stood by the tall restored window at the far end of the hall and he watched her come. And as she got closer she saw that the stillness with which he was holding himself was not composure but its opposite. A man braced the way one braces against a door that may or may not hold. The hand not holding his glass was in his coat pocket. She could see from six paces away the small strain of his knuckles through the wall. He had come here not knowing whether she would cross a room to him and he was about to find out and he had decided that he would find out standing still. She stopped a pace in front of him. "Mr. Malfoy," she said. "Miss Granger." There was a small silence. The orchestra had moved without her noticing into a waltz in a minor key. Someone behind her laughed at something too brightly. "You told Kingsley you weren't coming," she said. "I changed my mind." "When?" "When Potter wrote to me on Tuesday morning and said you were going to be here." Her eyebrows rose. "Harry wrote to you?" "Four lines. Very civil. Addressed to Malfoy, no first name. He said that you were expected at this function that you were expected to come alone that he thought I ought to know and that he would, and I quote, 'take it as a personal favor if I did not embarrass you.'" "And you said?" "I said that I would come that I would embarrass no one and that he would forgive me or not as he pleased." He wrote back with a single word. "What word?" "Acceptable." She laughed. It was small and unexpected and it escaped her before she could choose whether to let it. His mouth, for the first time in her memory of him, did something like a smile. A very small smile held in, controlled around the edges but a smile. "I am glad," he said quietly "to have amused you." "Don't get used to it." "No." The orchestra changed key. She became aware suddenly of how close they were standing closer than any two people in that room were standing closer than propriety cared for close enough that the fine wool of his lapel was perhaps 3 inches from the bodice of her green dress. She did not step back. Neither did he. "Draco." A small involuntary closing of his eyes again. She wondered if it would stop doing that in time. She hoped fiercely and privately that it would not. "Hermione." "I think," she said, "that we should leave." "Yes." "Now." "Yes." "Where?" He looked at her for a long moment. His eyes were gray and very tired and very awake. "There is a place," he said. "I would like to show you if you would come." "The Manor?" "No." "Not the Manor." "Not yet." "I will take you there in the spring if you still" He stopped himself. "There's a place I would like to show you tonight and it is not the Manor and it is not my flat and it is not public. It is mine. I bought it 3 years ago and I have never taken anyone there. I would like you to be the first." "Yes." "You have not asked me where it is." "No." "You are not going to." "No." He offered her his arm. He did it with an old-fashioned small formality that was entirely without affectation because it was simply how he had been taught to offer a woman his arm and he had not unlearned the teaching even when he had wanted to. She put her hand on the inside of his elbow. The wool was warm. Under it, for the second time, she felt the faint knocking of his heart. They left the atrium together. They left, she understood, in front of perhaps 300 witnesses. She found that she did not care and that he did not care and that the two of them walking the length of the restored marble floor with her hand on his arm was its own small announcement more effective than any interview more final than any letter to the Prophet. At the great door, Harry was standing. He did not speak. He inclined his head at Draco by precisely the angle required of a man acknowledging another man at a public function. And Draco returned it by precisely the same angle. And Ginny, behind Harry, mouthed something at Hermione that she chose not to interpret. Then they were out and the October night was on their faces and he was apparating them both. The place he had bought 3 years ago was a small cottage on the Sussex coast. She knew it was the Sussex coast before she had opened her eyes because she could hear the sea. It was a sound she had not heard in a year. The long slow draw of water on shingle, the hush and then the return. The hush and then the return. And when she opened her eyes she saw that they were standing on a low chalk headland in the dark and that there was a small cottage behind them with a single lamp burning in the window and that the sky over the channel was enormous with stars because there were no Muggle streetlights for 6 miles in any direction. "Oh," she said. "Yes." "Draco." "I bought it," he said "because I wanted one room in the world that had nothing in it. No crest, no portrait, no history, no inheritance only this view and a bed and a hearth and a bookshelf that I filled myself. I have come here alone for 3 years when I could not bear the Manor any longer. I have never brought anyone. I am telling you this now so that you understand what it means that I have brought you. I am not good at saying these things and I would rather show you than tell you. But tonight, I think I should do both. She did not speak. She could not. She walked to the low stone wall at the edge of the headland, and she put her hand on it, and the chalk was cold under her palm. And the sea below was a great, dark, moving thing. And the salt on the wind was on her mouth. He came and stood beside her, not touching, close. "When I gave you the book," he said, "at the bookshop." "Yes." "I was not sure then whether I was going to be able to tell you what I told you on Tuesday. I had not decided. I thought the inscription might say it for me, and that you might read it and understand, and I would not have to find the words." "It nearly did." "Yes." "I saw at Q that it nearly did. And I saw at Q also that nearly was not going to be enough for either of us. So on Tuesday, when the paper came, "You used it." "I used it, Hermione. I am not proud of using it. The paper was cruel. I should not have taken advantage of a cruelty to say a thing I should have found a kinder hour to say. I have been thinking about it for a week. I owe you an apology for the timing, and I am giving it to you now." She turned. The wind lifted the loose hair at her temple and laid it across her cheek, and she did not push it back. "Draco." "Yes." "I don't want the apology." "Hermione." "I don't want it. I want the other thing." "What other thing?" "The thing you were saving it for. The kinder hour." He went very still. "This hour," he said. "Yes." The sea below them drew back over the shingle. Somewhere inland, a dog barked once and was silent. The single lamp in the cottage window burned low and steady behind them, and the stars overhead were too many to count. And she understood, standing on the chalk of a headland in the cold, clean dark, that she had walked, in 28 days, from a desk in Bloomsbury, where she had been writing a column about a man she had wanted to hate, to this place, where the man was standing half a yard from her in the October wind, waiting to be told what to do next. She told him, "Come here." she said. He came. He did not reach for her first. He stood in front of her, a hand's breadth between them, and he waited for her to do the last of it herself, because he had understood, perhaps on her doorstep in the rain, and perhaps earlier, that this was how she was going to need to do it. She lifted her hand. She laid it against his cheek. The skin of his face was cold from the wind and faintly rough along the jaw. And under her palm, slowly, she felt the cold of it warm to the heat of her hand. And she felt his eyes close. And she felt the long breath he had been holding leave him at last. She went up on her toes. She kissed him. She kissed him carefully the first time, the way one opens a book that has been waited for. A small pressure of her mouth on his, a taking of measure, a question asked in the only language that did not require either of them to speak. He did not seize her. He did not deepen it. He let her ask the question, and he answered it by not answering it yet, by standing very still under her hand, and letting her find out, by degrees, that his mouth was warm, that he was trembling faintly under her palm, that he had been waiting for this without the expectation of ever receiving it, and that the receiving was, to him, nearly unbearable. She drew back a quarter of an inch. "Draco." she whispered. "Yes." "Again." He kissed her the second time. He kissed her the way a man kisses a woman he has loved for 6 years in silence and 1 month in speech, and has, for all of those years, and for all of that month, expected to live out his life without touching. There was nothing schooled about it. There was nothing practiced. His hand came up and framed the side of her face, the way one cups a candle flame against a draft, and his other arm went around her waist, and he drew her in at last against the wool of his coat and the linen of his shirt, and the slow, hard knocking of his heart that she had felt for the first time on a Tuesday morning on her sitting room sofa, and which was not slow now, and not careful, and not controlled. She kissed him back. She kissed him the way a woman kisses a man when she has finally admitted to herself, and to him, >> [clears throat] >> and to the dark of the sea, and to the old stars, and to the small lamp in the cottage window, that she has walked across a room full of witnesses for him, and that she would do it again tomorrow, and every day after, for as long as he kept asking her to, and longer. When at last they drew apart, they did not step away. He rested his forehead against hers. His breath was uneven. Her own breath was uneven. The wind moved between them and lifted the edge of her green dress. And he lifted a hand, and with the same small, astonished care with which he had taken her hand at the door of her flat, tucked the loose hair back behind her ear. "Eleven." he said. She laughed. It came out as almost a sob. She pressed her forehead harder against his. "What?" "Eleven reasons," he said. "I owed you an 11th reason. It was this one. That you love me. That I love you. That you have been, since a courtroom in the spring of 1999, the one argument I could not answer. That every reason I gave you to hate me was accurate. And that there was always, underneath, one reason you did not know, which was not a reason to hate at all, and which I could not tell you until you had written the other 10 down in a magazine that sold out in an hour. That is the 11th reason, Hermione Granger. That is the one you could not have written, because only I could have given it to you, and I have given it to you now, and I will not be asking for it back." She closed her eyes. "Take me inside," she said. "Yes." He took her hand. They walked together across the short grass of the headland, through the gate of the low stone wall, along the flagged path to the door of the cottage where the single lamp burned in the window. At the door, he paused, because he paused at doors, because it was who he was. And he looked down at her one more time in the lamplight. And whatever he had meant to say, he did not say, because she lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed his knuckles once, lightly, and he was undone. He opened the door. He drew her in after him, out of the October wind, into the warmth of the small room with its hearth and its bookshelf he had filled himself and its one window on the sea. And he closed the door behind them, gently, the way he did everything. And the lamp in the window went on burning quietly for anyone on the headland to see. There was no one on the headland. There was only the long, slow draw of the water on the shingle, and the old, enormous stars over the channel. And inside, in the small, warm room, a woman who had written 10 reasons to hate a man she had not known she loved, and the man who had loved her in silence for 6 years, and in speech for 28 days, and who was learning now, in the lamplight, with her hand in his hand, and her mouth close to his mouth, the newest and best reason of all, that she had come, and that she was staying. So, that's the end. Thank you for staying with me until the last page. I love this story for simple reason. It is about being seen, really seen, by the one person you did not want to see you, Hermione thought she was safe behind false name. She was not. He had been reading her for a long time, and she had been reading about him because somewhere inside she had been thinking about him, too. She just did not know it yet. I think we all have a list like hers. 10 reason to walk away from someone, 10 reason that are true, and then one quiet day one reason that is a truer. And that one reason changes everything. I hope this story found you at the right time. If it did, tell me in the comments. I read them all. Take care of yourself, and I will see you in the next story.