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In the fading light, Hermione could just make out Theo’s silhouette, messy hair and sharp jaw illuminated in the glow of the fairy lights strung up around the back garden.
They’d bought this house solely for the garden. The moment Hermione had seen it, she had fallen in love with it.
It was lush, set on a hill that started at the back porch and ended at a small creek, just before the treeline of the nearby forest. The soft grass was surrounded on the left and right by all sorts of different flowering bushes that bloomed in the spring. An ancient apple tree stood tall in the back corner, the perfect place to read and seek shade during the heat of summer.
The cottage built on the land was modest and lovely, big enough for the two of them and then some, but the garden was the true jewel. It had been in disrepair when they’d first moved in, but Hermione had seen its potential. Even in such a messy state, it had looked like something out of a fairy tale.
She and Theo had spent hours upon hours fixing it up and restoring it to its former glory. It was worth every minute of work they’d put in. They now had the home she’d dreamed of as a little girl—cosy and perfect and theirs.
When Hermione had been pregnant with their first, she would walk down to the creek after getting home from work, sighing in relief when her sore feet met the cool water. It was often that Theo would find her there when he finally got home, and they’d sit on the bank until the sun went down, talking and dreaming and planning.
Hermione felt a wave of nostalgia, thinking back to before she and Theo had truly begun dating, how hard he’d fought her affections.
After the war, he’d been in pieces—confused and lost and so alone.
In the rubble, seeing the broken mess left in the wake of the blood-purity fanaticism his father had so strongly clung to, Theo had felt unmoored, questioning everything he had thought he'd known.
He'd thrown himself into his education, returning to Hogwarts for his final year of schooling, keeping his head down and accepting the disgusted looks and muttered insults tossed his way by other students in the hallways.
He'd felt that was the least of what he deserved, after all.
Six months after Theo had gone back to school, his father had died in Azkaban, a result of his advanced age and the conditions of the prison.
There had been no love lost between Theo and his father. The elder Nott had been a hateful, manipulative narcissist who cared more about his status in life than his son’s well-being. Theo had spent most of his childhood in fear, making himself quiet and small to avoid setting off his father’s wrath.
She remembers holding him when he received word of his father’s death. At that point, so early on in their relationship—barely even a relationship at all—with what little knowledge she'd had of his family, Hermione had expected to see grief on his face.
That is not what she saw.
There had been pain in his eyes, yes, but he'd looked free.
It had taken a long time to begin to repair the damage inflicted and left behind by his father.
She'd had to fight for him, for them. She'd had to prove to him that he was not his father, that he was worthy of love and someone to care about him.
She'd had to show him the man that she saw when she looked at him.
The true Theo, the one who had stopped to help a little first year when they'd fallen on one of the moving staircases and scraped their knees bloody, escorting them to the infirmary and waiting with them because they were scared.
The Theo who had never once made Hermione feel like she needed to make herself less than she was, that wasn't intimidated by her intelligence and thirst for knowledge, but admired it.
The Theo who had finally cried in her arms on that cold night not so long ago, not for his father, but for the innocent lives lost in a war that needn't have been fought in the first place.
As she held her littlest baby to her breast, trying to get her to latch on and eat, she looked up to see her husband prance around the yard like a pony with their 2-year-old on his back, and there in the twilight Hermione knew that the struggle had been worth it.
He had been worth it.