Cold Feet

They settled in for a quiet night. Francis didn’t stir, so they retired to the living room and Hermione read while Harry watched television – volume turned low, of course, at Hermione’s insistence. She felt like a commando trying not to alert enemy soldiers to her presence as she crept between living room and bathroom. There was to be no toilet-flushing until Ginny came back. The whole house was so quiet that, when Harry sneezed a little too loudly, she almost hit the floor, as though she was under fire.



“For God’s sake, keep it down!”



“Herms, I was only sneezing,” Harry sighed.



“You can sneeze far more quietly than that,” Hermione complained.



*



“I feel like having an Indian,” Harry announced at nine o’clock. “Where are the menus?”



“Stuck to the fridge, where they normally are.”



Harry heaved himself out of his chair, the best chair in their living room. Hermione could feel the springs through the cushion in the one she was sitting in. They really did need to go furniture shopping some day soon.



She quickly sat down in the warm space Harry left behind while he called the takeaway with their order. It was always the same – two chicken tikka masalas, and a pilau rice and peshwari to share. It was probably the Indian equivalent of eating beans on toast. Whenever she called their order through, she thought she heard the guy at the other end of the line groan as he heard her chant the menu numbers she knew by heart. She very much wanted to try something different, just to prove that she wasn’t completely unadventurous, but when it came down to it, tikka masala was simply the dish she wanted most. In any case, Harry never changed his order, either.



It was while Harry was on the phone to the Delhi Curry Palace that Hermione felt a peculiar vibration under her backside. It took her a very interesting moment to work out that she must be sitting on his mobile phone, switched to vibrate. She fished it out from underneath her, intending to hand it over to him, still ringing, so that he could answer it as soon as he finished talking to the guy at the takeaway. But while she was fishing between the cushions, she must have accidentally picked up the call.



“Sorry,” she said into the receiver. “Didn’t mean to press that button. Harry Potter’s phone.”



The caller cut her off. Or perhaps they had just given up after waiting so long and didn’t notice that she had, at last, picked up.



“Shit.”



She checked the last number dialled, hoping it wasn’t Maria, expecting Harry to go into work and attend to some emergency – she had very little patience for Ministry-related emergencies. But it wasn’t Maria – it was Ron and Luna’s number. Hermione raised her eyebrows in surprise. Ron and Luna – or, more specifically, Ron – had purchased a telephone some years ago after observing Hermione and Harry using theirs. It had been a novelty for Ron at first, and he had taken great pleasure in calling the couple at least five times a day to tell them the smallest thing – but the machine had soon lost its appeal, and Ron and Luna used it fairly infrequently these days. Ron was probably calling to make sure Harry was still alive after his sorry exit the previous night. Hermione decided to call him back and give him a good old-fashioned Hermione Granger ear-bashing for failing to fight the case for Harry’s eyebrows. But when she pressed redial, it was Luna who picked up the call.



“Hello?” She sounded uncharacteristically alert, but also unsure, as though she was picking up the phone in someone else’s house and wasn’t convinced she should be doing it.



“Oh, hi, Luna. It’s Hermione. I think I just cut Ron off. Is he there?”



A pause.



“No. He’s still at work. He’ll probably be there until around nine. Saturday’s a busy day for viewings.”



“I suppose it is. But Harry just got a call from—”



“Actually, it was me who called,” Luna interrupted. “I wanted to speak to you.”



“Oh.”



“Yes, I… couldn’t find your home number and I don’t think I have the number of that strange little handheld phone you carry around with you, so I looked through Ron’s address book and found Harry’s. I thought he could give me your number and—”



“Well, you’ve got me now. What’s up?”



“Just…” Luna hesitated. “Can I call you back in a second or two? I think someone is at the door. I’ll call you back in a moment.”



She hung up, leaving Hermione staring at the phone. She really was a strange girl.



Harry had finished ordering the curry.



“Did my phone ring?” he asked.



“Yes,” she told him. “It was Luna. She wanted me.”



“What did she want?”



“No idea.”



Harry’s phone began to vibrate again. Hermione still held it in her hand.



“This will be her.” She pressed connect.



It was indeed Luna. She sounded a little breathless and spoke much faster than her usual dreamy pace. “Sorry about that, Hermione. Now, where was I…? Oh, yes. I was calling to say that I think we should arrange a baby shower for Mandy.”



“She’s not having the baby for another six months,” Hermione pointed out.



“I know, but these things take some organising and I supposed if we start planning now, we will have a better chance of getting everyone together at the same time.”



'We?' Hermione thought with annoyance. Since when had she become a member of the Quidditch widows’ entertainment committee? Putting together her own wedding had been enough to make her swear off organising so much as coffee for two in the immediate future.



“I thought you might be able to help,” Luna explained. “You organised our Christmas Ball at Hogwarts when you were Head Girl and that went perfectly. Also, you know Mandy better than I do, being such good friends with her Seamus. You probably know more of the friends she has from outside us Quidditch hangers-on. The only alternative is for me to come clean and ask Mandy herself for the names of the people she would like to be there. But that’s rather boring and it would be a nice for the party to be a surprise, wouldn’t it?”



“Yeah,” Hermione agreed reluctantly. “I suppose it would.”



“So, I thought we might arrange for a Sunday afternoon in late September, like the fifteenth,” Luna said pleasantly. “Do you have your diary there?”



“Hang on,” Hermione sighed.



Luna kept her on the phone for another thirty mindnumbing minutes, brainstorming the baby shower. Where should they have the party? At one of their houses or at a hotel? The Crossed Wands Hotel in Redmead had a "darling" little conservatory that would be the perfect spot to “have tea.” How should the room be decorated? She knew a good party shop where they could buy fabulous decorations in pink or blue, or maybe yellow if Mandy had decided not to find out the sex of her baby before it was born or simply didn’t want to tell them. What kind of games could they play?



“Games?” Hermione asked, a little more condescendingly than she’d intended.



Luna didn’t pick up on it. “Yes, games. You know, like guess the celebrity from their baby pictures. And we could have a sweepstake, where we all try to guess the baby’s gender and weight.”



Hermione bit back a retort which was basically along the lines of “I’d rather snuggle with a Blast-Ended Skrewt.”



After that, Luna wanted to talk about Valentine’s Day. Were Hermione and Harry going to do anything special?



“Probably not. I think we had our big Valentine’s Day last year.”



By the time Hermione got off the phone, the curries had arrived, Harry had eaten his share and was slyly eyeing Hermione’s. She sat heavily at the table and snatched her plate towards her with territorial aggression.



“I’m still hungry,” Harry complained.



“So am I. Touch my food, feel my wrath,” she snarled at him. But her barbed comment didn’t pierce his newly hair-free exterior. He just grinned. “I think it’s your turn to check on the baby,” she announced firmly, slapping his hand away from her naan bread.



*



Harry had warned her that, when it came to nappy-changing, after the initial two guilt changes, they would be taking turns. Fortunately, Ginny came before Hermione’s turn came up. After Harry had deftly swapped one damp nappy for a dry one, Francis slept all the way through the evening and was still asleep when Ginny knocked quietly on the door at ten minutes past eleven. Unfortunately, Francis did wake up the second he heard her voice. Then, he filled his nappy.



“He’s been saving it up for you,” Hermione joked. “Thank God.”



It was clear from Ginny’s face that the date had been fantastic, and even the state of Francis’ bowels, as she knelt down in her expensive robes to change him, couldn’t stop her smiling.



“Honestly, guys, by the time I got to the restaurant, I was so nervous, I was ready to Apparate straight back here. I had to force myself in there. But the second I saw Connor, I knew everything was going to be fine. He was so sexy, so much better than his picture!” He had sent one after a great deal of persuading. “So well dressed, too. I think I was expecting someone whose robes stopped halfway down his legs or something equally awful. Thank Merlin.”



“Thank Merlin,” Hermione agreed. “What did you talk about?”



“Everything. Everything! London, life, love…” Ginny’s face was split by a grin at the thought. “We talked about Chelsea – he’s just bought an apartment there. We talked about the twins - he was in their year, you know. We talked about which familiar we preferred, owls or cats? We both prefer owls. He used to have a tawny owl called Hooty in his Hogwarts days. Isn’t that cute?”



“Adorable. What else?”



“What limb you would sacrifice for chocolate.”



“What?”



“You know… which of your limbs you would have cut off in order to allowed to keep eating chocolate. That came after we had the most amazing dark chocolate mousse with raspberry sauce – Hermione, you’ve never tasted anything like it. Just like the stuff you get from Belgium. Anyway, Connor started this terribly funny conversation about what you would give up in order to be able to keep eating chocolate.” Ginny laughed at the memory. “He said he would give up both arms and both legs as long as his Mediwitch would spoonfeed him chocolate cake every day for breakfast. Hilarious.”



Hermione supposed it was one of those occasions when you had to be there. “Yes, hysterical. You really did talk about everything.”



A shadow passed across Ginny’s face briefly. Having refastened the poppers on Francis’ baby-gro, she sat back on her heels and sighed as she watched him happily kicking his feet in the air.



“Ah. Everything except Francis,” Hermione deduced.



“Except Francis,” she admitted. “I just couldn’t find the right moment. Not tonight. Things were flowing along so well. I couldn’t just say, ‘By the way, I’ve got a baby.’ It would have brought things to a crashing halt.”



Hermione gave a small smile of understanding.



“But I will tell him about Francis next time I see him and I’m absolutely convinced he’ll be fine about the whole thing. He clearly loves children. He kept telling me funny stories about his older sister’s kids and says he can’t get enough of them. She’s got a boy and two girls, all under seven. They make him laugh so much, he told me. He babysits them all the time. In fact, I think he might be getting a bit broody himself. Me having a son isn’t going to faze him at all.”



Hermione nodded, though she wondered how Ginny could have listened to a load of cute anecdotes about Connor’s nephew and nieces without interjecting with some cute story about her own son, who was, this sudden bout of diarrhoea notwithstanding, by far the cutest kid on earth. Still, who was she to judge how and when Ginny should tell her life story?



“So, when’s the next time?” she asked.



“Wednesday. If I can find a babysitter.”



The statement hung in the air. Hermione knew it was a request.



“I know it’s Valentine’s Day. Even Mum and Dad are going on some romantic dinner date.”



“I don’t think we’re really celebrating it this year,” Hermione mused.



“And you did so well tonight. I really expected you to be owling me every two minutes with some panic or other.”



“You did?”



“Face it, Hermione. Sometimes, you hold my baby as though he’s dead rat. I’m really proud of you for getting over that.”



She didn’t know whether to be flattered or embarrassed. It was one thing for her to know she wasn’t exactly comfortable around babies but another thing entirely that her discomfort had been noted. True, she didn’t have to touch Francis at all between Ginny leaving him here and coming back to pick him up, but Ginny didn’t need to know that. Suddenly, she felt as though she had something to prove.



“If you think you can trust us,” Hermione said with mild sarcastic emphasis. “I’m sure Harry won’t mind if we babysit again.”



“Is that the sound of Hermione Granger volunteering?” Ginny teased.



“It’s not that bloody difficult, looking after a baby.”



Even as she said it, Hermione was praying that she wouldn’t come to regret her sudden bravado.



Ginny grabbed her friend’s face in both her hands and planted a kiss on the end of her nose.



It was only when she let go of her that Hermione noticed the filth on Ginny's hands and the fresh smudge of something brown and sticky on her cheek.



She spent the next thirty minutes after Ginny’s departure scrubbing her cheek with soap and a rough face-cloth.



*



“I volunteered us to babysit again,” Hermione told Harry when she emerged from the bathroom with one very pink cheek.



“You mean you volunteered me,” Harry murmured into her neck.



“You only had to change one nappy,” she snapped.



“Hey, calm down. I didn’t mind. It’s good practice. Next time, you can watch me do it. Unless you’re intending me to give up work and be a stay-at-home dad when my first son is born. Which would be totally fine with me, by the way. You’re the high-powered career woman, not me.”



Harry’s hands slowly slid up her sides from her waist to her breasts. He squeezed them together sensually and Hermione had that feeling she got at the top of a rollercoaster, when gravity momentarily lost its hold on her body and her internal organs rose towards her mouth. But this time, it wasn’t a sensation of lust or desire.



“I don’t think I’ve got enough energy for sex tonight.”



He stayed still behind her and Hermione could almost feel him frowning. “You’ve been saying no to me quite a lot recently, you know,” he said in a tone that was meant to pass itself off as an observation but held a clear note of complaint. It was true. She had been making more excuses over the past few weeks. “Why do you feel tired all of a sudden, Hermione? Are you sure you’re eating enough? Getting enough iron? You've been looking a bit skinny recently...”



“Are you saying you don’t like the way I look?” She pulled herself out of his grasp.



“Hermione, no! You know I think you’re beautiful.”



“Do you?”



“Of course I fucking do.”



She knew he did. He told her every day. Harry would never have said anything to critise her body-shape. She knew he adored her body, even though she found her hips too narrow and her boobs too small. She had always been comfortable enough to stand naked in front of him. But for some reason, she let him think his harmless comment had made her irrationally angry. She stormed from the living room back into the bathroom, closed the door behind her and let it slam shut. No brushing teeth side by side that night. When she got into bed – wearing shorts and a T-shirt – she turned her back on him while he pleaded his case into her shoulder. She refused his kiss goodnight.



“Come on, Hermione, I’m trying to say sorry. I’m an idiot, I know I am. What do I have to do to make it up to you? I hate it when I upset you. Sometimes, I don’t know why you ever agreed to marry me in the first place. Then I go and get my eyebrows shaved off. You would be well within your rights to call the marriage off. I can only say that no man will ever love you more than I do.”



He sounded so contrite, so desperately sorry for himself, even though he had actually said absolutely nothing wrong. She hated herself for letting him think that she really thought he was an arsehole, even for half an hour. But for some reason she couldn’t even articulate to herself, she wanted to hate him in that moment. She just didn’t want him to touch her. She wanted him to walk away from her. She wanted him to be away from her.



“Hermione…” Harry pleaded.



Eventually, she turned to face him and brushed her lips against his.



“Truce?” he asked.



“Truce,” she told him. “I know you weren’t trying to critisise me. I love you.”



But the moment for actually having sex had definitely passed.



*



Next day, Hermione got her period. The single drop of blood swirled like ink against the white porcelain. It was as though she had bled poison out with it. Harry looked relieved, too, when she blamed her latest temper tantrum on it being her ‘time of the month.’



“What can I say?” she laughed. “It’s my hormones.”



*



The following Wednesday – Valentine’s Day – Harry left the house before Hermione. She found a Valentine’s card addressed to her on the table. Harry had already opened the card she had chosen for him and it had pride of place on the kitchen windowsill. Harry had signed his name inside her card – no point pretending anymore – which had an arty print of a Parisian street scene on the front. It was a beautiful reminder of the events of twelve months earlier, of course. Hermione immediately felt guilt that she had put so little thought into the rather crude card she had bought for him in return.



As she walked through the streets of London, the Interflora vans were already out in full force, delighting lucky girls all over the city with roses that had mysteriously doubled in price since the twelfth. Postmen limped under the weight of that day’s declarations of love. Giggling schoolchildren examined each other’s cards for clues as to the identities of mysterious senders. A white-haired old man smiled a secret smile to himself as he walked through the streets that morning with a red carnation in his buttonhole.



Love was in the air and it was definitely not a good day to be single. Hermione was just surprised she didn’t feel more smug that she wasn’t.



*



On televisions both Muggle and magical, it was a day of soppy films and old romantic standards. As she walked into the studio, Hermione was greeted by the soulful strains of some love ballad or other on the Wizarding Wireless. Elle walked in just behind her.



“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered. “That’s the third time I’ve heard that awful song this morning.”



Elle was very much single. Unhappily so. She had lost the very last of her romantic optimism. “I couldn’t find a date on a fucking date plantation,” she assured Hermione on a regular basis.



In order to get through the day without hexing everyone, she had declared that ‘Let’s Talk’ would be a romance-free zone.



“Our contribution towards keeping those suicide rates down,” she said when she announced her loveless plan to the team.



So, while every other channel on both Muggle and Wizarding television played classic romantic films or had special Valentine’s-themed shows, Nancy’s guests, for the most romantic day of the year (according to the men at Hallmark), were a wizard who had made a small fortune selling second-hand broomsticks on a stall in Diagon Alley and a representative from a new charity that provided free therapy for couples in relationship crisis. Lena from ‘Couples In Unity Group’ came onto the show to explain why the charity was campaigning for Ministry support for their work.



“We’re going to do a segment on how to have a successful divorce on Valentine’s Day?” Nancy breathed.



“That’s right.”



They all knew better than to argue with the boss.



At the time Elle had announced her plan, Hermione had thought her the ultimate killjoy, but when Valentine’s Day rolled around, she found herself curiously glad of the breathing space in a world that had been taken over by hearts, flowers and various shades of pink overnight. Somebody needed to inject some reality back into proceedings.



“The cost to the Wizarding World of all these broken relationships is incalculable.” Lena began her case with the usual depressing fact that divorce was soaring among wizards and witches. “The trauma of divorce can lead to depression, problems at school for some children, increased childcare problems when both parents suddenly have to go out to work… And statistics have shown that, in many cases, people soon regret getting that divorce after all. They realise that the grass isn’t any greener and they might actually have been able to stay together if they had known how to start talking about their problems. Our organisation provides support for that.”



“But what if talking through these problems just makes the couple more certain that they simply married the wrong person?” Nancy asked.



Elle and Hermione both leaned forward on their desk in concentration while they waited for the witch to answer.



“That’s why we’d like the Ministry to look more closely at helping us provide pre-marital support as well. We also aim to offer advice to those who are about to get married and help them make sure they’re ready for the next step.”



From the corner of her eye, Hermione saw Elle turn towards her ever so slightly.



“Doesn’t sound very romantic,” said Nancy.



“It isn’t. But romance can blind us to reality.”



Elle nodded wisely.



“Then, there’s the enormous pressure our culture puts on couples to make their relationship official with a big wedding. I frequently talk to couples who admit they had their doubts about getting married even as they took their vows. But they went through with the marriage because the venue had been paid for, the invitations had already gone out and they didn’t want to disappoint people. Unbelievable as it sounds, these couples chose an unhappy marriage that can cause years of suffering over just a few weeks of embarrassment. Nobody ever died of embarrassment.”



“But don’t you think premarital stress is inevitable?” Nancy interrupted. “I think I’d be quite reluctant to just walk away if I’d spent six months making seating plans.”



“Yes, but sometimes, what we think of as the usual pre-wedding jitters are actually the manifestation of misgivings that go much, much deeper. Our subconscious minds cry out for us to take a proper look at the way we truly feel. And far too often, those doubts are ignored.”



*



“Christ, could that show have been anymore depressing?” Hermione frowned when they were finally off air and the guests were safely out of the way.



“Shall we see if we can get you and Harry a premarital appointment?” Elle joked. The whole office had been extremely amused to hear about Harry’s eyebrows. “Or perhaps we don’t need to after all…”



Having escorted this morning’s guests to the Apparation Point, Ray was staggering back into the office under the weight of what looked – and sounded – like a hundred red Serenading Roses. In the end, it turned out there were only three dozen, but they were beautiful – deep blood-red, each flawless and as big as a cabbage, the stalks tied with fine gold ribbon. The music they emitted was the heavenly song of a Siren, captured and magically cast upon the blooms. The cost must have been staggering.



“Oh, sweet Merlin. They’re stunning!” Nancy cried breathlessly, burying her face in the roses to get their scent and swaying to the angelic music. “Harry Potter is an amazing man.”



“Or still feeling very guilty,” Ray interjected.



“Let’s hope he keeps it up after you’re married,” Elle said cynically. “Next year will be the big test. Ask the woman from ‘Couples in Unity’.”



Nathan fingered a single bloom thoughtfully. “Must have cost him the same amount of money I make in a year.”



“A bit cliché, though – getting roses from your fiancé,” Ray shrugged. “Are you sure they’re from him?”



“Very sure,” Hermione said quickly. “The clue was in the card.”



Elle snatched the card from her and peered at the message. ‘Remember Venice,’ was all it said.



“Remember Venice? What does that mean? I thought Harry proposed to you in Paris.”



“He did,” Hermione agreed. “But we went to Venice on our first Valentine’s Day together, before I started working here.”



“Oh. Okay.” Elle seemed happy with that.



“Wish someone would send me roses,” Nancy sighed.



“You can have some of these,” Hermione offered.



“Won’t Harry be disappointed?”



“If a man pays for three dozen very expensive Seranading Roses on Valentine’s Day, he doesn’t expect the girl to start giving them away,” Ray said archly.



“Harry’s not like that. He really won’t mind.”



“Don’t be stupid, Ray’s right,” Nancy said firmly. “He’ll want to see them all when you get home. Though, perhaps you can just leave them on my desk for a while. I’ll make believe I have a secret admirer until it’s time to go home.”



“I could do with a secret admirer,” Nathan muttered.



“Ridiculous commercial bullshit,” Elle sniffed.



Nancy just winked at Hermione as she passed her desk.



*



At home, on the kitchen table, Harry had placed a single pink Everlasting Rose in a vase. He stood at the cooker, making spaghetti and meatballs for two.



“Remember Paris?” he smiled.



*



Their romantic interlude wasn’t going to last long that night. Ginny arrived with Francis just after Harry and Hermione had finished eating their spaghetti, sadly with no romantic scenes reminiscent of ‘Lady and the Tramp.’ She was much less nervous about leaving her son with them for the evening this time. In fact, it seemed instead that she was obscenely eager to offload her baby and head off for her second rendezvous with the handsome Connor.



Connor had managed to wrangle a table for two at one of the most popular new restaurants in town, despite the fact that it was Valentine’s Day and he had given very little notice. “Unless he booked the table months ago and would have asked any girl who came along,” said a cynical Harry. Ginny concluded more favourably that Connor must have serious sway in the restaurant world as a result of his job. He was a fine-food importer – oils, flavoured vinegars, truffles, rare herbs found only in deepest Veela country, that kind of thing. He spent much of his time travelling from organic farms in Spain to the submerged fields of Mermaid-tended sea-fruits in search of the perfect Chimera eggs, select bloodberries from Transylvania or Faerie-made honey – hence the passionate conversation about which body appendage you would be willing to give up for the sake of chocolate, Hermione deduced.



“Get any big Valentine’s surprises?” Ginny asked her while Harry washed up in the kitchen, and Ginny flicked multicoloured bubbles out of the end of her wand to amuse Francis. Hermione didn’t have a chance to tell her before Harry popped his head around the door.



“Hey, it’s my favourite little man,” he grinned at Francis. “What’s the plan for tonight, then? Watch a couple of naughty films? Drink some Firewhiskey? Go to a bar and pick up some hotties?” He took Francis by his little hands. The baby opened his mouth wide in delight – his ‘silent laugh,’ as Ginny called it. He couldn’t seem to control himself after that; his eyes and mouth just got wider and wider as he looked up into Harry’s face. Perhaps it was the lack of eyebrows that brought it on.



Ginny repeated the sleeping, feeding and peeing schedule she had just outlined to Hermione. Harry nodded and parroted the key elements back to her to signal that he’d listened and understood. “I feel so much better knowing that a responsible adult is here,” Ginny told him. She gave Hermione a wink as she said it, but the brunette suspected there was still more than a little truth in the joke.



“Have a nice evening,” she told Ginny as she showed her to the door. Harry had volunteered to make sure Francis went to sleep and Ginny was happy to let him, having decided that he had the magic touch when it came to her son. “I’m very jealous of you going out,” Hermione added while Ginny had her check her teeth for lipstick and gave her one last twirl in her fabulous new robes.



“Even with such a handsome fiancé at home?” she teased.



Nearly five days after the shaving ritual, Harry still wasn’t looking that great. The marker-pen eyebrows were still pretty much visible, a pair of faint grey slugs, while underneath, dark stubble was starting to show though. Itchy stubble. Harry had developed a new annoying habit over the past twenty-four hours – rubbing at the pathetic black growth.



“Stop it,” she ordered when he had finished settling Francis down and walked back to the kitchen, scratching like an ape.



“But it's driving me crazy,” Harry complained.



“And you’re driving me crazy by scratching your face like that. You’ll get brow dandruff,” she told him. His skin was already getting pretty dry from the constant friction. “I told you, I’ll see if I can look up any spells to ease the itching when I get the chance.”



“I’m sorry this Valentine isn’t quite like last year,” Harry told her as he handed her a bottle of beer and they settled down on the couch. “Just think – this time twelve months ago, I was absolutely shitting myself while we waited in the queue to go up the Eiffel Tower. Did you really not guess what I was going to do when we got up there?”



In truth, she had suspected that something was going on from the moment they got to their hotel and found a bottle of vintage champagne, but Harry had seemed so agitated and stressed out in a bad way, she was half-expecting him to dump her while they were surveying the view rather than propose to her.



Harry picked up her left hand and began to stroke her fingers. “You’ve got such beautiful hands. I just had to put a ring on them.”



Hermione smoothed her right hand over the dark stubble on his head while he continued to murmur compliments. Harry could be so damn romantic at times. It was one of the things that had surprised and delighted her about him when they first become more than just best friends, apart from the fact that years of Quidditch had truly given him a body to die for. He was a man who loved nothing more than flying fifty feet in the air on a thin piece of wood, chasing a stupid gold-coloured ball, yet he often said things that sounded like the beginning of a poem.



He lifted her fingers to his lips and kissed them one by one. He blew a small puff of air on her engagement ring, then rubbed it lovingly. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t said yes.”



“Pushed me off the top of the Tower?”



“No, just thrown myself off instead.”



Now, he leaned over and started to kiss her neck – soft, slow kisses of the kind that could normally be guaranteed to drive her crazy.



Not tonight, though. Not right then.



“I think I can hear Francis.”



Harry momentarily lifted his head from kissing the top of her breasts. “I can’t.”



“No, wait,” Hermione insisted, actually holding Harry’s head firmly away from her so that he couldn’t start kissing her again. “I can definitely hear him. There, he did it again. He’s whimpering. Didn’t you hear it, too?”



Harry sat right up and cocked his head towards the door. “Nope. I can’t hear anything.” He headed back down towards her boobs. She blocked him.



“That’s because your hearing’s fucked up from getting hit on the head by Bludgers all the time,” she told him. “Francis is definitely crying. I’d better go.”



She started to get up but Harry gently pushed her back into the chair.



“He’ll go back to sleep if you leave him.”



“What if he doesn’t?”



“Give him a few seconds at least. I still can’t hear anything.”



“Well, I can. What if he’s whimpering because he’s got a blanket wrapped around his neck? What if we check on him in ten minutes’ time and find out he’s choked to death?”



“For God’s sake, I’ll go,” Harry sighed. “Since I have the 'magic touch'.”



*



Perhaps she had heard Francis crying, perhaps she hadn’t. Whether he was awake or not before, he definitely was awake by the time Harry finished tripping over the box of photo albums Hermione had left out in the hallway with the intention of storing them away in the cupboard. Harry reached out to steady himself against the hall table, which was really just a gathering place for junk, and brought that crashing down with him, too. Francis’ cry went up like an air-raid siren.



“Harry!” Hermione groaned, though it clearly wasn’t his fault. She was the one who had left that box lying in the middle of the hallway after all.



When she came out into the hallway to set the table right, Harry had already picked Francis up and was beginning the long process of getting him back to sleep again. He paced the room with Francis against his chest, rubbing the baby’s back and singing softly. He could only fit in three paces before he had to turn.



It was quite a sight, these two men in her life. One was so tall and strong, one so small and new. And yet, Harry didn’t seem nervous at all as he rocked from foot to foot with Francis’ head on his shoulder. Since picking up Francis for the first time, Harry had quickly lost his ‘baby terror.’ That was term Luna used for the look on Ron’s face when anyone passed him a person under the age of three.



“He acts like you just handed him a time-released Dung-Bomb set to go off in two seconds. Honestly, he’d much rather cuddle a broomstick,” she would often say.



Harry, on the other hand, was turning out to be a natural. Why didn’t she feel more pleased and proud?



“I’ll sort out the table when Francis is asleep again,” he assured her. “You just sit back down and leave it to me.”



Hermione didn’t need to be asked twice. By the time Harry came back to the living room, however, she had dug out the wedding invitations and was busy writing out addresses with the special fancy quill she had learned to use specifically.



“What are you doing?” Harry asked.



“Our wedding invitations.”



“Now?”



“When else am I supposed to get them done?”



She had put the box of unwritten invitations in Harry’s place on the sofa. He sat down heavily in his chair and picked up The Daily Prophet.



“At least this must mean you still want to get married,” he muttered.



*



Ginny Weasley, like Cinderella, made sure she was back before midnight. By half eleven, actually. Harry and Hermione were happy enough to stay in on Valentine’s Day, but Harry had insisted that he wanted to get a decent night’s sleep, and that meant being in bed by midnight.



Ginny didn’t seem unduly disgruntled by such an early curfew. When Hermione opened the door, she was standing on the top step, swinging her handbag and gazing off dreamily into the distance like some girl from the sixties who had just managed to kiss one of the Beatles. When Hermione asked her how the date went, Ginny gave the kind of sigh she usually reserved for particularly fantastic ice cream. She was feeling so full of joy that she grabbed Hermione around the waist and waltzed with her in the hall.



“Went well, then,” Hermione deduced.



“So well… I could have danced all night!” she sang.



Hermione put a finger to her lips. “The baby.”



“Was Francis good tonight?” she asked.



Harry brought out the Moses basket with its sleeping cargo. “With Uncle Harry in charge, he wouldn’t dare not be.”



“You’re getting pretty good at the baby thing,” Ginny said admiringly.



“You should have seen him,” Hermione told her. “Cuddling, singing, changing nappies…”



“I changed him twice. I think he’s got a bit of diarrheoa again.”



“Probably because he’s teething. They swallow a lot of saliva.”



“Too much information,” Hermione grimaced.



“You’re an angel, Harry.”



“I’m just your regular hero. So, is there going to be a third date?” Harry asked.



“Oh, yes,” Ginny nodded enthusiastically. “And a forth, a fifth, a sixth and dates forever! You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been with someone I feel so comfortable with. It’s just so easy being with him. It really is as though we’ve known each other for years, not just two and a half weeks.”



“And this is the one you met through the dating agency?” Harry mused.



“I know. Isn’t it crazy? It’s the last place I expected to find a man this good. If anyone had told me six months ago that I’d join a dating agency and find someone who not only doesn’t look like he’s been living underground for twenty years but makes me feel like I could say just about anything and he’ll understand exactly what I’m trying to tell him and never judge me and—”



“Did you, then?” Hermione asked, assuming that this meant she had made the ultimate revelation.



Ginny pulled a grieved kind of face. She knew exactly where Hermione’s mind had leapt to. “Hermione, it was Valentine’s Day. The place was crowded. I felt absolutely sure that if I said, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve got a baby,’ the whole room would suddenly fall silent and stare at us. He was having such a great time. *I* was having such a great time. I didn’t want to spoil things,” she shrugged.



“Isn’t that the best time to broach a tricky subject?” Harry said. “When things are going well?”



“Would you really want to have a heavy conversation like that in a crowded restaurant?” Ginny responded. “Honestly, Harry, the place was so busy, we were practically rubbing elbows with the couple on the next table. I heard all about her wrist injury and all about his bowels. I didn’t want them to know my business, too.”



“Fair enough. There might be a better moment.”



“Your call,” Hermione agreed.



“Sometime soon, though, hm?” Harry said firmly.



“Of course.” She waved their concerns away. “Of course, I’ll tell him as soon as I can.”



*



But the longer you kept a secret, the harder it got to reveal it. Everybody knew that much. It was like trying to pull a sticking plaster off an old scab slowly. If you did it quickly, there was just the short sting. If you did it slowly – the coward’s way – you would feel and hear single tiny hair screaming in agony as it was ripped from your pores. A secret kept for too long was like one of those old-fashioned fabric plasters that never came off in one piece and left a sticky residue for weeks.



Hermione had decided at the beginning of her relationship with Harry that they would never keep secrets from each other, not even little ones (unless they were secrets of the secret-birthday-trip-to-Amsterdam variety). She had bitten her tongue on secrets both big and small in the past and it had always ended badly. What was the point of promising to spend the rest of your life with someone if there was still a part of you like a locked room they just didn’t have the key to? It was hard at first. Hermione was not an emotionally open person, and keeping secrets was a good way to avoid total intimacy - and avoiding total intimacy was a good way to avoid feeling pain. But she hadn’t kept any secrets from Harry and soon found she didn’t want to.



Until now.



“Happy Valentine’s Day,” Harry murmured into her neck as he put out the lights. “I’m sorry it was so dull compared to last year. Spaghetti, babysitting and one unspectacular rose.”



She closed her eyes tightly against the guilt.



And that might have been the end of it. She comforted herself with the thought that her mystery bouquet wasn’t such a big deal if she didn’t even acknowledge she had received it at all.



That night, she hoped that someone nice found those beautiful Seranading Roses where she left them on a park bench – stripped of their magic, of course – and took them home to some other nice person who would really appreciate them. She just wanted to be rid of those flowers because they reminded her of a moment of betrayal: the moment when she didn’t tell her ex-boyfriend that she was about to get married to Harry Potter.



'Remember Venice'



Of course, she knew the second she opened the card that the roses weren’t from Harry, but rather the one man she knew who had more money than him to buy astronomically priced flowers like these.



Hermione had been to Venice only once in her life, and it was Draco Malfoy who took her there.



How many years ago was it now? She calculated almost seven. She and Draco were in their final year of university and he had surprised her with a weekend away to take a break from torturous dissertations and studying.



Draco met her at her shared student flat in Coventry and they took a magical carriage pulled by Draco’s father’s finest Pegasi to Italy. Being somewhat terrified of heights, though she was too stubborn to ever admit as much, the flight had been something of an unpleasant experience to Hermione; but Venice more than made up for the discomfort of getting there. Draco had booked them into one of the finest hotels the city had to offer, a grand, medieval building from Venice’s heyday of carnivals and silk merchants, looking right onto the Grand Canal.



When they finished christening that lavish hotel bedroom (and the bathroom, and the living area, and the balcony - in those early days, they were at it like bunnies on viagra), Hermione held onto Draco’s arm tightly as they wandered through the narrow cobbled streets and over the elegant carved bridges, gazing at the elaborate carnival masks and brightly coloured trinkets in the city’s shop windows.



Venice was enchanting. She loved the ancient, tall buildings, their lowest floors empty and flooded as the city’s water-level rose year by year. She also loved the famous black gondolas with their stripy-shirted, tenor-singing navigators, and she loved sitting in St. Marco’s Plaza, placed before the sheer magnificence of the cathedral and watching tourists feed the flocks of pigeons. To be perfectly honest, she had preferred Venice to Paris.



During the course of the weekend, Draco bought her fine Venetian silks and an elaborate, glittering bone-china carnival mask that hung in the kitchen of the penthouse suite they shared until the day they broke up. It was the first thing she flung to the floor in her anger and sorrow when she left the apartment forever, shattering it into a dozen brightly coloured pieces.



What had he been thinking when he sent those roses? That even though Harry Potter was her live-in ‘boyfriend,’ the relationship couldn’t possibly be so serious that she was off-limits for a bit of floral flirting? Did this actually have nothing to do with Hermione at all and all just came back to the rivalry he shared with Harry? Hermione felt a twinge of indignant anger that Draco could be so dismissive about her Big Relationship before she reminded herself that he only had his conversation with her on which to base his outrageous assumption.



Above and beyond that, he obviously thought it was appropriate to flirt with her again. He must have thought – based on those three minutes of small-talk at the Apparation Point – that all was forgiven. They could be friends again now, he thought. He could try to start things all over again without having to go through the irritating post-mortem of what went wrong the first time. Because he certainly hadn’t bothered with a post-mortum back then. From the moment he announced that he didn’t want to be with her anymore until the moment he had called for one of his many cars to pull up outside and take him and his things back to Malfoy Manor, telling her ever-so-kindly that she could stay in the penthouse until she found her own place, had taken little over two hours. Hardly long enough to explain the death of a relationship that had flourished for two and a half long years.



Flattered? Insulted? How was she supposed to feel?



She was supposed to be getting married to her best friend. She wasn’t supposed to be thinking of Draco at all, much less analysing his motives for sending her three dozen red roses, accompanied by a card guaranteed to bring back the hottest of memories.



Harry was soon asleep. She could tell by the pattern of his breath, the way his shoulder moved up and down in somnolent rhythm. She curled herself tight against his back and breathed in the smell of him. He smelled of warm soap, cut grass and, faintly, the spicy scent of the pain-relieving potion he had been rubbing into his shoulder since injuring it at Quidditch a few weeks ago. Hermione let her nose rest against that injured shoulder and tried to suck Harry into her as though she were a diver inhaling oxygen.



This was the man she loved, literally in front of her nose – as he had been most of her life, until she finally opened her eyes and saw him as maybe something more than a platonic best friend. Sensitive, loving, brave Harry Potter, who took on Voldemort, saved the world and lived to fall in love with her. His presence should have obliterated any trace of her romantic past. He had. He did.



However, while she tried hard to convince herself that Draco’s big romantic gesture hadn’t worked and he was still firmly consigned to her past with that broken carnival mask, there were still several other women of Hermione’s acquaintance who were determined that Draco Malfoy would feature more prominently in their futures – and, by default, Hermione’s.



*



After the dubious success of Elle’s anti-romantic Valentine’s show (the owls they’d received in response were all very depressing), they decided that the subject of that Friday’s show should be altogether lighter. At the Thursday afternoon meeting, it came down to a toss-up between Morris-dancing or cheese-rolling (the two great English eccentricities). In the end, they decided they’d go for both and have a battle of the best of rural British madness with representatives from each insane activity explaining why their particular brand of lunacy was the better one. Unfortunately, the cheese-rolling representative wouldn’t be able to make it to the studio – ironically, he’d broken both his legs chasing a wheel of cheese down a very steep hill the previous weekend.



“Can I just bring everyone’s attention to something for next week?” Nathan asked at the end of the meeting.



“Not the Wanda’s Boutique shoe sale!” Ray quipped.



“There’s a shoe sale?” Nancy perked up. She had been on the point of dozing off; they all had. There was something about the combination of a very warm room, Butterbeer and the doughnuts Elle had bought on her way to work…



Nathan gave Ray his most condescending look. “Actually, it’s something I thought might be a good basis for the whole of next Friday’s show.”



“Go on,” Elle yawned. “I’m intrigued.”



Nancy put her finger to Ray’s lips before he could say anything stupid again.



“Next Friday is National Single Parents’ Day.”



“Is it really?” Nancy asked. “I didn’t even know they had such a thing.”



“Well, the Muggles do. And this year’s is on a much bigger scale than before.”



“Nathan, you’re a star,” Elle smiled. “How did you find out?”



“I made sure we were on a couple of mailing lists. You said that we should always make sure we’re on the mailing lists of our guests’ organisations.” That was true. Nathan logged the details of all their guests diligently and was the king of the follow-up owl. Ray could never be bothered, relying instead on picking his stories out of newspapers and magazines.



“What a great idea,” Nancy remarked. “But what should we do for it?”



Nancy looked at Elle. Elle smiled back.



'Oh, shit,' Hermione thought with dread. She knew at once exactly what Elle and Nancy would suggest if Nathan hadn’t already made the arrangements. Nancy’s eyes were actually sparkling.



“Well, obviously, since it’s official Single Parents’ Day for the whole of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the main organisations have been inundated with requests for people willing to do interviews and most of the single parent celebrities have gone, too,” Nathan continued. “Which is why I went straight to the that man who came on the show a few weeks ago… The one Hermione knows from school.”



Hermione buried her face in her arms and groaned. She had been stitched up, and stitched up good.



“What was his name again?” Elle asked innocently, as though he wasn’t the only son of the notorious Death Eater Lucius Malfoy and head of the Wizarding World’s most ancient and prestigious line of Purebloods.



“Draco Malfoy,” Nathan replied.



“Oh, yes,” Nancy said, getting in on the joke. “I think I remember the guy you’re talking about.”



“What about the rule we’re supposed to have about not having the same guests back on the show more than once a year unless there’s a really good reason?” Hermione began her case for the objection. “Draco was on the show less than two weeks ago.”



But there really was a good reason to have him back on. “It’s National Single Parents’ Day,” Elle said simply.



“And he was really good,” Nancy agreed. “After some of the guests we’ve had on the show recently, I deserve to work with someone who can actually handle breathing and talking at the same time.”



She looked at Hermione pointedly. The previous week, Nancy had interviewed her worst ever guest in the history of the show, a first-time novelist – one Hermione had championed – who said next to nothing for the first ten minutes, then burst into tears when Nancy asked her to talk about her inspiration for the book, which was all about her dead mother. That show had been a washout.



“Mr. Malfoy was certainly popular,” Nathan reminded everyone. He flipped through his notes for some figures. “We had our highest ever volume of Floo-calls and owls for that show – in the region of fifty percent more than usual for a Monday afternoon.



Damn Nathan and his statistics.



“And as far as I can remember, all the responses were positive,” he concluded.



“Yeah, but there were still plenty of viewers who didn’t owl in, I bet,” Hermione argued. “Some people might find his second appearance boring. There must be someone else we can interview instead. What about my friend, Ginny Weasley? She’s still a single mother with an interesting story. She’s just started seeing a man she met through a dating agency. She could talk about single parents and dating.”



“We had Ginny on the show less than four months ago,” Elle pointed out.



“Rules were made to be broken,” Hermione said fiercely. “You just bloody said so yourself!”



“Draco is an official representative of a single parents’ organisation and comes from a high-profile family,” Nancy said. “That gives him a bit more gravitas than Ginny.”



“Gravitas is very important on ‘Let’s Talk’,” Elle agreed.



“Bullshit!” Hermione scowled. “We’ve just spent half an hour discussing the possibility of doing a whole show about bloody cheese-rolling!”



“And Morris-dancing,” Nathan added.



“I don’t care who comes on the show as long as I get to go outside and have a cigarette while you girls are scratching each other’s eyes out over who can have him,” Ray huffed.



“Well, I don’t want him!” Hermione shouted thoughtlessly. She didn’t know why said that. It just exploded out of her. Her colleagues stared at her.



“Of course not,” Elle muttered under her breath.



*



“Why are you so angry about this?” she asked Hermione as the young brunette stomped about the office like a sulky little brat later that afternoon. “He’s the perfect guest for Nancy.”



“Sure,” Hermione replied sullenly.



“Did something happen between you two that you haven’t you haven’t told me about?” Elle continued. “If there’s some big reason why you can’t be in the same room as him, we won’t have him back on the show. But it’s been, like, seven years since you guys split up, right?”



“Six years.”



“That’s still an awful lot of water under the bridge, Hermione. Merlin, I’ve almost forgiven my husband for being a complete prick and it’s less than four years since he moved in with my sister.”



Hermione could hardly compete with that Jerry Springer-style revelation. She’d forgotten about Elle’s particularly extreme case of sibling rivalry.



“But if you don’t feel comfortable, then I can tell Nathan and Ray that they’ve got to stay late and come up with something different.”



“Why do I have the strong feeling that you were in Slytherin when you attended Hogwarts?” Hermione said gruffly, finally yielding in the face of Elle’s not very subtle emotional blackmail. “Forget it, it’s fine. The show is all set and maybe I’m overreacting a little. It’s just that he’s my ex-boyfriend and Harry’s old rival, and I don’t want Harry to think I’m deliberately getting him back into the studio. He hates Draco, you know.”



“What did Harry say when you told him about the last time?”



“I didn’t tell him,” she admitted.



“Then there you go.” Elle knew she had her. “He doesn’t need to know this time, either. Don’t go catching some terrible illness before next Friday, will you?”



The bitch.



*



Draco Malfoy’s imminent return as Nancy’s Friday guest raised a whole host of questions for Hermione, not least whether she should tell Harry.



She and Harry didn’t often talk about work. When he got home from the Ministry, he wanted to switch off, and he almost always was able to. There were very few times when Harry couldn’t be distracted from the thoughts of the ever-increasing pile of paperwork in his office by a bottle of beer and a repeat of 'The Simpsons' on the TV and, to be perfectly honest, Hermione was happy enough with that. She wasn’t overly eager to hear the details of his day at work, particularly not over dinner. They didn’t talk much about her job, either.



But this was different. They were getting married and Draco wasn’t just another guest on the show – he was her ex. He was Draco Malfoy. He was the man who had almost shattered her and left Harry to pick up the pieces, which he did so selflessly and without complaint, even though he had warned her right from the start that Draco Malfoy would only break her heart. Harry had hated the former Slytherin more than he ever had for doing that to her. And he needed to know that Draco had come back into her life.



Prior to Harry and Hermione getting together, Harry’s longest relationship had lasted only six months and he freely admitted it had only lasted that long because the girl in question had been posted in Singapore for most of that time. His problem, he had found, was that so many girls were only after his fame and money, he couldn’t tell which were the genuine ones. He had suffered a lot of disappointment and hurt because of it. But none of Harry’s exes mattered that much anyway, he assured her, and the one thing Hermione had learned was that the only exes you could really be friends with were the ones you were completely over. Just look at Harry and Ginny. Or herself and Ron. They had been couples once, and the four of them remained the best of friends to this day. Harry even used to date Amanda Finnegan, back when she was just plain old Mandy Brocklehurst.



Harry and Mandy had been seeing each other for just a couple of weeks before Harry made his excuses in an extremely cowardly letter sent via owl (that was how he described it). Fortunately for Mandy, Seamus – who had been staying on Harry’s couch at the time, having just been kicked out by his last girlfriend – was only too happy to be a shoulder to cry on when Mandy appeared on Harry’s doorstep, howling for his blood. Seamus managed to persuade her that she’d had a lucky escape, and after that, destiny took over. Soon, she was able to announce that Harry’s brief appearance in her love life was one of the best things that ever happened to her.



Yes, Harry’s exes were harmless – Hermione knew this because she had been there for most of them. It was all ancient and quite amusing history. He had a good line in dinner-party anecdotes about the ones who soon grew disillusioned with the reality behind the myth of The Boy Who Lived and left him in disappointment when they realised the glorious hero who they’d spent their entire lives hearing stories about complained about work and slobbed out on the couch and made mistakes just like everyone else. Half of them ended up dating his friends. Certainly, none of them had ever caused him to shut himself away for days in his room and consider casting ‘Obliviate’ on himself just so he could forget…



Six years should have made Draco Malfoy ancient history.



So, why was she so worried about telling Harry that Draco was going to be on the show? For the second time. She didn’t know why she hadn’t mentioned the first surprise encounter. She didn’t think Harry would be jealous or alarmed, exactly – there was nothing to be jealous about. But what if she didn’t bother to tell him and her discomfort at Draco’s reappearance came out as an ‘amusing’ anecdote at the next work Christmas party?



‘Did Hermione tell you about the mess she made of the desk she looked up and saw…’



Or what if Ginny spilled the beans one day, which was much more likely. If she hadn’t forewarned Harry, then it might suddenly appear as though she had a reason for not letting him know.



It seemed simple. A woman who was planning to get married should have no secrets from her beloved fiancé except the design of her wedding dress. Speaking of which, Nathan had left a neat note on her desk saying her mother had called to remind her she had a fitting at four-thirty that afternoon.



“You must be excited to see it,” Nancy remarked when she noticed Nathan’s note.



“What?”



“The dress, of course. I heard you had decided on a gown instead of wedding robes. Very nice, dresses are much prettier, I think. Will you bring a photo so we can have a look at you in all your glory?”



“Sure,” Hermione muttered. It was the last thing she needed.



*



Hermione got to the dressmaker's five minutes late to find her mother already there. She had taken the day off work from the dental surgery she and Hermione’s father still ran together, and travelled up from Surrey to meet her daughter for the first fitting, then go for a bite to eat before she got the train back home again. It was a curious thing. Karen Granger had never been one for dragging Hermione around the shops, trying to pretty her up, as Molly Weasley had always done with Ginny when they were children. Yet, she was playing the mother-of-the-bride role to its fullest.



After Hermione and Harry got engaged, her mother had driven up to London three Saturdays in a row to help her trawl through the bridal magazines of London’s best stores until Hermione found a wedding dress she didn’t think made her look like she was on her way to a fancy dress party.



In her imagination, Hermione got married in a London registry office wearing a white trouser suit. In reality, she was going to be married in a sixteenth-century church in a full-length ivory silk gown. The bodice was strapless, the skirt full; it was tasteful and yet beautiful. Hermione wouldn’t even have thought to have tried it on, but the sales assistant coerced her into giving the dress a try, and it turned out she was right. She was surprised at how enarmoured she was of something so feminine when she finally put the dress on. That was six months ago. Now, her very own version of the shop sample was ready to be tweaked into perfection.



The dressmaker was already getting impatient by the time Hermione arrived; another bride was due at five. Hermione tore off her jeans and lifted her arms like a ballerina so the dressmaker could drop the dress over her head. A stray pin scratched one of her thighs as the skirt settled around her feet.



“Don’t bleed on the dress!” her mother shrieked when Hermione yelped.



“I’ll try not to,” Hermione retorted sarcastically.



She stepped onto the podium so that the dressmaker and her assistant could move around her, taking the dress in. Karen Granger pointed out the hem looked a little crooked at the back. There was much tugging on the bottom of the skirt to prove that the left side did, in fact, match the right exactly – it must be Hermione’s legs which were uneven. The bodice needed to be taken in a little tighter, however.



“You’ve lost weight,” the dressmaker accused. Hermione half-expected the woman to shake her fist at her.



“Hermione, are you eating properly?” her mother demanded.



“Yes, Mum.”



“Have you had anymore thoughts about your headwear?” her mother asked while Hermione lifted her arms obediently so that the dressmaker could adjust it.



“A helmet?” Hermione suggested. The previous week, her mother had called in a panic to tell her that part of the plaster on the vaulted ceiling of the church had fallen down. They’d had to hang nets from the beams to stop any further chunks of masonry wiping out the congregation.



“Be serious,” she said now. “I still think you would look beautiful in my old veil. It would solve the something old and something burrowed thing as well, if the moths haven’t already got to it.



Karen Granger had kept her veil for decades. It had been her mother’s veil before that. It was a heavy affair – real lace, not the fake stuff. It reminded Hermione of her grandmother’s crocheted doilies. She didn’t see how it would possible to wear that veil and get to the altar without a guide dog. And there was the small fact that she wasn’t sure she wanted to wear a veil anyway.



“We’ve got some veils you can try on,” the dressmaker’s assistant suggested.



“No, no need.” Hermione didn’t particularly want to mess her hair up – she was having one of those extremely rare good hair days – but she could tell her mother wasn’t going to let it go.



“Just to see,” she whispered.



“We’ve got little coronets to fasten the veils in place,” the assistant continued. “These just came in today.” She showed Hermione two headdresses that looked as though they had been fashioned out of the gold foil that was usually used to wrap chocolate bars. She let her mother choose the one she liked best – which was, of course, the one Hermione thought most hideous.



The bodice adjustment was finished now. She stepped down from the podium and let the assistant fasten the first veil to the back of her head with a hard plastic comb. Could plastic draw blood? In the right hands, it seemed.



“Your hair’s a bit slippy,” she explained as she jabbed Hermione repeatedly in the scalp.



Finally, the damn thing stayed put. Hermione heard the ethereal whisper of tulle as, between them, the assistant and her mother lifted the top layer of the veil up and over her face. There was a moment’s more fuss while the crown was place on top of that.



“Come and take a look.” The assistant helpfully held out her arm for Hermione in her newly blinded state. The young witch stepped back up onto the podium. The tulle in front of her eyes and the same tulle reflected in the mirror completely obscured her face from view. Hermione realised the significance of hiding her features – as she stepped into the church, she would be Hermione Anne Granger, but as she stepped out, she would be a different woman altogether, a wife, one half of a married couple. This veil was to be her chrysalis, hiding the transformation.



Weddings were so much about the bride, weren’t they? The bride got the best outfit and the most attendants. But what Hermione realised then was that all this fuss was giftwrapping. She was giving herself to Harry, and he was giving himself to her. But would they both be getting what they really wanted?



When they chose the church in which they were to be married, they had coffee with the vicar and read through their wedding vows with him. Harry knew there was no way she was going to promise to obey him and he joked that it might be more appropriate for the phrase to come in his half of the vows anyway, since that was pretty much how it had always been. For the most part, they left most of the vows as they appeared in the traditional prayer book. One of the parts they left in was about coming together to have children and, lately, that too had been worrying Hermione. Was she, in effect, making a promise that she would mother his children? Was if she changed her mind?



They were just words. They could have a proper conversation after they were married, and if she decided then that she didn’t want to have kids and Harry decided that having the family he’d always craved was more important than merely being with her… Well, they could always get a divorce.



Behind her, she heard her mother sniff loudly. It happened every time they went into the damn shop. It had happened every time she put on a wedding dress when they were still just checking dresses out, before she even chose the one she wanted.



But this time, she felt quite emotional herself. She was standing in her wedding dress, imagining Harry with another woman, a woman who definitely wanted the kind of life he had always hoped for. The life they had talked about when their relationship was new and it all seemed such a long way off, and therefore, it was safe to speculate about the house, the garden and the two children playing with a Labrador on the lawn. It hadn’t seemed like such a bad scenario then, had it? She had listened to Harry talking about the future they could have together and been happy to join in, picking names for a boy and a girl.



Harry still talked about the fantasy. Hermione supposed it was no surprise; Harry had been deprived of a normal, happy childhood, so it was natural he craved his own family to love and care for now he was grown-up. He ran through a new set of children’s names every time he found a new person to admire. Hermione had stopped playing that game a long time ago. Had she stopped before Ginny got pregnant? Before Francis was born? When had she started to find the idea of having children faintly menacing?



“My little girl,” her mother muttered, as she always did.



“Do you want me to lift your veil back so you can see what you’ll look like with your face showing?” the assistant asked.



“Not quite yet,” Hermione told her. “Give me a moment longer like this.”



She needed a moment to collect herself. She could have got away with claiming the sight of her dress had filled her with unstoppable joy, making her emotional. But she didn’t want to explain anything at all. Not then.



“For God’s sake, Mum,” she muttered instead. “You’ve been crying far too much, considering I’m supposed to be getting ready for the happiest day of my life.”



*



Hermione was glad to get back into her jeans. She forgot to take the picture for Elle.



When the fitting was over, she and her mother jumped into a taxi and headed for House of Fraser. Her mother wanted to catch the end of their winter sale and perhaps find the perfect present for Hermione’s father, whose birthday was in a few days’ time. Hermione managed to dissuade her from buying him another sweatshirt that he would only confine to the back of the wardrobe. He might have been getting on in years but David Granger wasn’t going to be retiring and taking up golf anytime soon.



After that, they trawled through the racks in Harvey Nichols. Her mother tried to convince her that she needed a pair of brown trousers of the kind that only an Italian woman could make chic.



“Housewife trousers,” Hermione snorted.



“Well, you’re going to be a wife soon, aren’t you?” her mother joked.



“I don’t have to have my fashion sense removed as part of the ceremony.”



When they had finished shopping, they went upstairs to the restaurant. Her mother giggled like a schoolgirl while the waiter, who was clearly gay, flirted with her over the menus. Once they had chosen, Karen Granger continued to gossip about a bunch of people Hermione had never met and probably never would. It was hardly Hermione’s preferred kind of gossip, anyway. No surprise comings-out, scandalous affairs or secret love-child turning up on the doorstep, just a litany of their friends’ new grandchildren, her father’s new diet and Mrs. Howard’s nasty root canal.



“How is Ron and young Ginny?” her mother asked when she’d finished telling Hermione about an extension that didn’t have planning permission.



“Good. Ron’s still with Luna, of course. And Ginny’s met a man.”



Her mother’s eyebrows dipped into a frown which she quickly ironed out. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be disapproving; Ginny may have been a single mother, but these days, that was no reason to confine yourself to a life of poor spinsterhood.



“She met him through a dating agency.”



“Oh. I hope he’s not a serial killer.”



“I don’t think so. Lots of people join dating agencies or meet people on the internet these days. Even wizards.”



“And how is her baby getting on? Freddie?”



“Francis. And he’s growing fast.”



“I heard. Harry said you’ve been doing some babysitting.”



“When did he tell you that?”



“When I called the other night. You weren’t home.”



Hermione remembered now. In fact, she had been home. When she saw her parents’ number on caller ID, she told Harry that she didn’t have the energy. She would have let the answer machine pick it up, but Harry couldn’t do that. He always picked up the phone to everyone, and now, he always picked up the phone to Hermione’s family , too. Not picking up when loved ones called only happened in television, as far as Harry was concerned. Good people like them didn’t find their families and friends frustrating.



“Were you out somewhere nice?” her mother asked.



“Probably still in the office,” Hermione lied.



“On a Sunday? You know, I wish we could get your show on our plain old Muggle TV. I’d watch it every morning. Had anyone interesting on recently?”



“Nope, nobody, no one interesting at all.”



Their food arrived. Karen told her daughter about her father’s cholesteral level in more detail as she picked the coriander off her jacket potato. She should really warn Harry to watch his as they got older. Some girl from primary school that Hermione didn’t remember had had a baby. Was she taking folic acid in preparation?



“Preparation for what?” Hermione asked.



“For having a baby. To prevent spina bifida.”



“Who’s having a baby?”



“Well, you. After the wedding. I know Harry wants to start a family as soon as possible. He told your father.”



“Oh, did he now?”



“You ought to start thinking about it soon. You can’t start getting prepared too early. I overheard a girl in the hairdresser’s who has started having IVF. She’s not even thirty yet.”



“I’m not ready for a baby yet.”



“No one’s ever ready, Hermione. The day comes and you just get on with it.”



Hermione paused with her fork halfway between her plate and her mouth. 'Get on with it?' “Like you did?” she wanted to say to her mother. She saw the woman sitting on the back step of the house, finishing her cigarette and ignoring her upset child. It would have been the perfect moment to ask her about that day; the perfect moment to say, “But it didn’t come naturally to you, did, Mum?”



It wasn’t just that afternoon on the step that was coming back to her now. The last couple of days, she’d been trying to remember what life was like when she was four or five years old. Her parents had good jobs and collected Hermione every day from her beloved grandmother’s house after school. Her father brought her mother flowers every month when they got paid. Her mother had friends – good friends. Auntie Amy, who was training to be a hairdresser and cut Hermione’s hair. Badly. Auntie Cathy, who made her a fabulous angel outfit for her school’s nativity play with her professional sewing machine. They saw a lot of Auntie Amy and Auntie Cathy while Hermione was still little. It seemed so obvious now that it was because her mother couldn’t cope on her own.



What if she turned out to have more in common with her mother than her light smattering of freckles, her stubborn streak and her bloody naturally curly hair? What if she had a baby and she hated it? That was what she wanted to ask. But she didn’t. She just let her mother carry on trying to put her mind at rest with an overlong anecdote about their former receptionist at the dental surgery who, having insisted she would be sending her child to boarding school as soon as it was off the breast, ended up enjoying motherhood so much, she quit her job and had two more children in the space of two years.



“Honestly, Hermione, your father and I never thought she would be happy to stay at home and be a mother. But there you go.”



“Mum, if anyone’s staying at home, it’s going to be Harry. I refuse to be a housewife.”



“Oh, I know that, darling,” her mother said placidly. “You always were an overachiever. I think you truly would go mad if you had to stay at home.”



“Yeah,” Hermione said listlessly, battling with the old sow image again. She let her mother continue with her theme until even she was bored.



“Don’t forget to call your father on his birthday,” she said when she had run out of what she clearly thought was appropriate motherly advice.



“I won’t. What does he want for a present?”



“Perhaps you could get him some of the CDs he’s asked for.” Her mother searched in her handbag for the small, leather-bound notepad her father had given his wife for Christmas the previous year. “He’s started listening to all this young people rock music. I think he’s going through a bit of a mid-life crisis…”



*



After they’d eaten, Hermione and her mother took another cab to Victoria Station. Hermione waited with her until her train pulled into the station and walked down the carriage until they spotted one that was occupied with a woman her own age and a “nice young man in a suit” who looked as he might at least attempt to defend his fellow passengers if the train was rushed by knife-wielding hoodlums.



They stood on the platform until the guard started walking the length of the train, closing the last few open doors. Her mother pressed her face between her hands.



“I love you, darling.”



“You too, Mum.”



They kissed goodbye.



Hermione walked away, feeling miserable. Every time she arranged to see her mother, she told herself it would be different. She told herself that she wouldn’t regress to a sullen teenager, that they would talk about lots of serious subjects and she would happily take advantage of the wisdom of her mother’s years and ask for her advice. But they’d never had that kind of relationship. Never. Hermione was too scared to tell her mother she was unhappy and she thought maybe her mother was too scared to notice. Every time she put her mother back on the train or waved her off in the car, she felt the distance between them more keenly than ever, as though she’d just said goodbye to an actress who was acting as her mother for the day.



As though they didn’t know each other at all.



*



On the way home that night, Hermione decided to tell Harry what was coming. She would broach the subject as soon as she got into the flat.



“Harry, I’ve got to something to tell you.”



“What?” he said distractedly.



“Next Friday is National Single Parents’ Day. We’re doing a show on the subject, you see, and the man we’ve got coming in to talk to Nancy is… my ex-boyfriend.” That seemed the best way to say it. One sentence. All in a rush. But when she tried to tell Harry the identity of this ex-boyfriend, it caught in her throat.



Harry was quiet.



“Harry, it’s Draco Malfoy,” she clarified. “Remember him?”



“Mmm-hmm…”



Hermione blinked. How could Harry possibly not react to that? “Well… I just thought you should know, that’s all. You don’t mind?”



“Mind what?”



“That I’m going to be working with my ex.”



“No, no. You go ahead.”



She supposed it was a better reaction than she ever could have hoped for. But she wasn’t convinced that Harry had even understood the question; he would never have acted so calmly if he had. He hadn’t looked from The Daily Prophet once while she talked to him.



She knew she should tell Harry one more time – and make certain he heard her – but she didn’t.