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Adelaide Richardson was forty-two years old when the letter showed up. However, to tell this story we have to tell the story of Adelaide Myers- not Richardson, twenty-three years old and late to work. Here she met William Richardson, Will if you please, and hit it off. They lose touch for a few years and then Adelaide is twenty-eight and she’s just gotten a call asking if she’d like to meet at a coffee shop downtown.
Adelaide does not fall hard and fast, but instead slowly and cautiously. She likes this man with a taste for only the most sugar-imbued coffee and a sweetness that is fairly rare. Adelaide knows she’s getting older and her mother has been nagging, and so Adelaide finds herself eighteen months later at an altar with this sweet man ready to commit until death do we part.
Then as things oft proceed, within a year or two Adelaide finds herself expecting. She and Will had settled down and sure, no one was ever truly prepared for parenting, but they thought themselves reasonably capable. So at age thirty-one, Adelaide gives birth to a daughter with the starts of her father’s mousy brown hair and blue eyes that will soon turn the exact hazel of her grandfathers.
As the first child grows taller with each season, soon a second and a third accompany her. The first is prone to strange things like paper cutouts dancing around or a window breaking at her anger, while the other two are only as strange as every other child is. And Adelaide was the youngest of four, she knew what sibling rivalry could do so she did her best to treat all her children equally.
Should you go back to now, where Adelaide is forty-two and not twenty-three or thirty-one, you would see Adelaide holding a letter embossed with gold and wax reading Tiffany Richardson, Second Largest Bedroom, 98 Juniper Avenue, Kippersburg. Of course, like any sane person, she assumes it is a hoax or prank by some neighbourhood kids.
Then the stern-faced woman had shown up to take Adelaide, Will and Tiffany to Diagon Alley. It had been a bit of an issue finding a babysitter at last minute for Jeremy and Katie and it had certainly been a surprise to learn that there’s a secret society of magic people. Including racists. And terrorists. Which would likely affect her daughter, and yes it was upsetting to see these things in the news but this was her daughter and Adelaide is Not Pleased to be sending her eldest into such an environment with only a month or two’s prior warning.
“So,” Will had said, still a bit winded from all the excitement, “Is there a tour of the school?”
Minerva had smiled primly and explained no, it wasn’t even possible for muggles to enter the grounds. Then Adelaide had asked if there were things like parent-teacher conferences and Minerva once again said no. Adelaide asked if there were any possible ways for muggle parents to see what their children are learning, and Minerva had said no, but the school was by far the best in Wizarding Britain and that muggles most likely couldn’t even understand the subjects anyways, so what was the point?
And so it is with a great deal of harrumphing that eventually ends with Will and Adelaide waving at their eleven-year old daughter, equipped with a dogwood wand, newly-purchased owl, and all the other supplies, for what is the last time for at least the next six months as she gets on a steam train. Thankfully they have two other children to care for, which helps the anxiety a bit. Jeremy had been awfully quiet lately, while Katie had been reading every kid’s horror novel she could get her hands on and then delightedly regaling the events over the dinner table. Repeatedly. It’s to both Will and Adelaide’s delight to receive a letter from a recognisable tawny owl named Holly. The letter is written in messy ink on parchment and it’s somewhat illegible in places.
Guess what Mum? I’m a Gryffindor! They’re the best house, brave and strong. I’ve made friends too! There’s Harry Reed- he’s a halfblood and named after Harry Potter. Then there’s Elsie Heath, she’s a muggleborn like me. And Uruquart Gallagher, he’s a pureblood but a good one, not like the Malfoys or the Parkinsons. They’re all in Gryffindor, of course.
I have to go now, love you and Dad and tell Jeremy and Katie I said hi!
Adelaide blinked at the letter, before reading it aloud to the table. Will’s smile grew slightly strained at the fact Tiffany had mentioned her friend’s blood statuses as though her family would care. Katie listened raptly at first, but upon realising there were no mentions of magic went back to hiding her peas. Jeremy just picked at a scab on his arm.
Tiffany decided to stay at Hogwarts for Christmas, and sent her regards. They’d gathered around the Christmas and opened presents, but it just wasn’t the same. Adelaide missed her daughter.
When Tiffany finally came home she was changed. Brasher, louder, more sure of herself and quick to judge. She would talk of wizarding things as though Adelaide obviously knew what she meant and it made Adelaide frustrated when she’d asked Tiffany for what seemed the third or fourth time what a certain term meant and Tiffany had smiled fondly and said, “I forget how you’re such a muggle sometimes, mum.”
Muggle. Muggle, muggle, muggle. Not a nice word, sounded awfully close to an insult. Wizards were in the minority by far, she doesn’t understand why they couldn’t just call them something like regular people or mundane. It’s just- muggle.
“Why don’t you invite your friends over sometime, dear?” Adelaide had asked once and Tiffany had done just that. Elsie and Uruquart had made it- Harry was off vacationing in magical Spain with his parents. Elsie had been polite and very sweet (we joke she’s practically a hufflepuff) Uruquart was... a product of his environment. He was polite, yes, but he regarded her family’s home as some oddity or curiosity. Like one would observe an animal in a zoo.
“It’s so muggle,” said Uruquart, delighting at the microwave (it’s so funny how you muggles have made do for yourselves) and Adelaide had gritted her teeth into a smile, asking if he cared for any more tea. He’d waved her away easily with the practice of someone who was used to such a gesture.
She knew she shouldn’t dislike children but this one seemed to be an unfortunate representation of the more close-minded of the wizarding community.
Tiffany stayed at Hogwarts for the remaining Christmases. They slowly got used to not having her presence. One summer, when Tiffany was fifteen, Adelaide suggested getting a job at the nearby corner store for some pocket money.
“Oh, mum,” Tiffany said in that tone, “I’m not going to be in some muggle job. I’m going to be an auror.”
“Oh,” Adelaide had said, and when had her little girl who had wanted to be a veterinarian decided to be a police officer?, “When did you decide that, darling?”
Tiffany rolled her eyes. “Ages and ages ago, mum,” and she rolled over and went back to read her magazine with moving images as though Adelaide wasn’t worth her time.
Were all teenagers this bad?
The next time Adelaide saw her eldest daughter (now eldest of three girls, not two. Jeremy was actually a Jasmine and Adelaide had wanted to smack herself for missing it) Tiffany was wearing an honest-to-god cloak and robes. There was a young man with her, pale-skinned and wearing gold-rimmed glasses.
“This is my fiancé, Harrison,” Tiffany had cooed and she was seventeen and this man couldn’t be less than twenty-five years old and he was engaged to her daughter.
The dinner quickly ends when Harrison makes one too many remarks about how honoured they must be to raise such a powerful witch and how the other two children are perfectly fine too (though that one’s a bit strange, he had said, eyebrow raised at Jasmine). In the end, Will, sweet, slow-to-anger Will, is the one who asks him to leave.
Before he goes, Will looks at him and says, “I have three daughters and I am proud of all of them.” The younger man takes the hint and has the decency to look slightly abashed as he and Tiffany hurry out the door. She’d politely asked Tiffany not to bring him again.
It brings her a guilty amount of relief when Tiffany sends an owl a month later informing Adelaide of her and Harrison’s separation.
Adelaide Richardson was forty-seven years old when her youngest, Katie, had paled and held out her phone to show her a video. It showed an all-too-familiar alley and all it’s delights for a good ten minutes. “It’s all over everything,” Katie had said and Adelaide had elected that both her kids could stay home from school that day.
When Tiffany had showed up, she’d been frazzled. “Ugh,” she’d said, “Some stupid fucking squib got bitter and now the entire Ministry is dealing with it’s mess.”
And at this moment Adelaide looked at this young woman with mousy brown hair and hazel-brown eyes and saw a stranger.