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As Draco stepped onto the street, the front door to the Ministry swinging shut behind him, he thought that he rather deserved the way his last six months had gone. He could still picture the moving van in front of Hermione’s flat, her curls wild in the wind as she bossed movers to and fro amidst the chaos that was her returning to the Muggle world.
“It’s the only place you haven’t been,” she’d said. “And I need to be somewhere you aren’t.”
But, of course, she hadn’t vanished – just found a place to sleep a world away from the streets they’d once walked and the trains they’d ridden late at night when they couldn’t sleep. His two owls might have been returned as undeliverable, but he knew that she still ate dinner with Harry and Pansy on the weekends and that she was helping Luna shop for her wedding to Theo. And, cursed with that knowledge, Draco saw her everywhere.
Echoes of her, anyway. He only ever caught glimpses in his periphery of things that could have been her. A woman sitting with her back to him at their favorite cafe, sat alone at their old table. A ministry employee facing away from him in a conference room, holding all of Shacklebolt’s attention and making him late for a DMLE briefing. An old friend, sitting at Harry’s kitchen table and enjoying company at a party he hadn’t been invited to.
“It’s been eleven years,” she’d cried. “When will you be ready?”
Draco didn’t know then, just like he still didn’t understand why the idea of marrying her had seemed like the worst thing in the world. Eleven years, three boyfriends, a handful of situationships, and countless tries had passed, and she’d opened her door for him every single time. He wanted to ask what difference it made if she opened it one more time – if they could talk, if he could know what she was up to.
Someone brushed past him on the street, and he blinked, standing up on his tip toes as if she’d be waiting for him at the corner like she once did. She wasn’t, though. Just like it wasn’t her he’d spotted through the frosted glass of Blaise’s front door, or shopping in Madam Malkin’s by the window display.
It had been her, though, at King’s Cross Station the day she left for a trip abroad. She’d been headed South, and he’d been headed North, and as their train cars passed he swore she opened her mouth to say something.
And that, Draco thought as he ran a shaky hand through his hair, was what kept him up at night. The not knowing kept him going – not knowing her, not knowing if she remembered him with the same rose golden glow he remembered her. Piecing together their memories like counting the cobblestones on the ground beneath his feet as he walked home was his favorite pastime.
Just like counting the freckles on her cheeks and drinking wine in Luna’s sitting room had once been enough to make him wish he wasn’t heading to Theo’s right then, knowing full well Hermione wouldn’t be there. Instead of looking in, he would be cursed to look out, praying to some god that she’d be passing by on the wings of fate.
The same wings that had carried her away to begin with. Just like he deserved.