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The thing is, she'd been almost certain.
Not certain certain — not certain certain, not the kind of certain that means you've already planned for it, already shifted your mental furniture around to make room. More the kind of certain that lives in your body before your brain catches up. The kind that makes you buy the test at the apothecary three streets from home instead of the one round the corner, because you don't want to explain yourself to anyone you recognise, and then carry it in your bag for four days without taking it because you're not quite ready to know for sure either way.
That kind of certain.
So she'd known. Mostly. And still, when the little charm on the test blooms gold — not ambiguous gold, not could-be-gold, aggressively, unambiguously, committedly gold — she sits down on the bathroom floor and stares at it for a long time.
The tiles are cold through her pyjamas. She doesn't move.
Right, she thinks. Okay.
Harry left at half seven. He'd kissed her on the cheek, she'd said something about breakfast, he'd nicked the last of the good coffee and she'd let him because she was distracted and also because she loves him, in that order. He won't be home until six. It is currently eight-fourteen in the morning.
She has approximately ten hours with this by herself.
She looks at the test again. Still blue.
Okay, she thinks again, as though repetition will help.
***
She makes tea she doesn't drink. She stands at the kitchen window and looks at the garden, which needs doing — Harry had said he'd get to it at the weekend and then hadn't, which is fine, she also hadn't, they are equally culpable on the garden front — and she thinks: there is going to be a person. She thinks: we are going to have to childproof this garden. She thinks: I don't know how to childproof a garden. She thinks: I don't know how to do any of this.
The tea goes cold. She vanishes it and makes another.
The second one she actually drinks, standing up, staring at nothing in particular. Outside a stray cat picks its way along the fence with immense dignity. A cloud moves. Somewhere down the street someone starts a car.
She is pregnant. Ginny Potter is pregnant. Ginny Weasley, some reflex corrects, and she thinks: no, actually, Ginny Potter, who is apparently going to be someone's mother, and that's when the terror really arrives, properly, sits down at her kitchen table and makes itself comfortable.
She knows nothing about babies. This is not strictly true — she has nieces and Teddy, she has held babies, she is the youngest of seven and there is a certain ambient knowledge that comes with that — but it feels true, in the way that abstract knowledge always feels insufficient when the thing itself is suddenly real. She knows things about babies the way she knows things about Healing: theoretically, at a remove, in a way that will absolutely not prepare her for the specific weight of one in her arms, the specific sound of one in the night, the specific fact of one that is hers.
Hers. Harry's. Theirs.
She sits down at the table.
Harry, she thinks, and the terror does something complicated, shifts, makes room for something else. She thinks about telling him. She's been composing it in her head all morning without meaning to — Harry, I need to tell you something or Harry, sit down or possibly nothing, possibly just handing him the test and watching his face, which she thinks might be the version she actually does — and every time she gets to the moment of his face her chest does something she doesn't have a word for.
He's going to be so happy.
She knows this about him. She knows it the way she knows his coffee order and his nightmares and the specific expression he makes when he's pretending not to be moved by something. He wants this. They both do, have talked around it and about it in the careful way of people who want something badly enough that they're slightly afraid to say so directly. But Harry — Harry, who grew up with nothing, who has built this life around him with both hands — Harry is going to be completely, helplessly, embarrassingly delighted.
She wants to see it. She wants to see it so badly it's almost painful.
Six o'clock, she thinks. Ten hours.
***
She tries to work in the afternoon.
She's writing a column — she does match analysis now, three times a week, a new exercise implemented in their routine to apparantly make the players "analytical", everyone on the team hated it (they're not at Hogwarts) but she is good at it in the way she was always good at seeing the whole pitch at once — and she sits at her desk with her notes and her parchment and writes approximately forty words before she stops and looks out the window for a while.
The garden still needs doing.
She writes twenty more words. Stops. Reads them back. They're fine. She has no idea if they're fine. She can't tell anymore; everything in her head is occupied.
She puts her quill down.
She's going to be someone's mother.
She sits with this. It's different from the terror, or adjacent to it — not the can I do this of the morning but something bigger and stranger. Her own mother had seven. Seven. Ginny has sometimes thought of this statistic with a mixture of awe and mild horror, and she is not planning on seven, absolutely not, she is planning on — well. One, apparently. One, for now, which is enough, which is more than enough, which is the whole world as a starting point.
Her mother had been so young. Ginny is twenty-three. This feels both young and not young at all, which she suspects is simply what twenty-three feels like.
She picks the quill back up. Puts it down again.
You're going to be fine, she tells herself, in the no-nonsense voice she uses on herself when she's being an idiot. You're going to be completely fine. Loads of people do this. Mum did this seven times and she's still standing. Harry will be there. You're going to be fine.
The thrilled part of her, the part that has been quietly winning since about noon, chooses this moment to send up a small and tentative flag.
She lets it.
***
By five o'clock she has rehearsed the conversation forty-seven times.
Harry, I have something to tell you. Too ominous.
So something happened today. Terrible.
I took a test this morning and— Fine but she'll lose her nerve in the middle.
We're pregnant. Is that the right we? It feels right. It also feels enormous.
She abandons the rehearsal and sits on the sofa and watches the clock instead, which does not make it move faster. The garden is doing something gold in the late light. She should really sort out the garden. They should sort it together, actually, make an afternoon of it, and she finds herself thinking: we can do it in spring, when I'm— and she stops.
When I'm further along, she was going to think.
She presses her hand flat against her stomach. It feels exactly the same as it always has. She doesn't know why she expected different.
Hello, she thinks, feeling slightly ridiculous. I don't know what I'm doing either. We'll figure it out.
***
She hears his key in the lock at six-twelve.
The door opens. He's talking before he's through it — something about the Floo, a delay, Robards being insufferable, the usual — and she stands up from the sofa and turns around and he stops.
He always knows. She has never worked out how he does it — she hasn't said anything, she's barely moved, her face is doing its best — but he looks at her and something in his expression shifts, goes careful, goes present in the way he gets when something matters.
"Gin," he says.
She's had ten hours. She's rehearsed forty-seven versions of this conversation. She knows exactly what she wants to say.
"Hi," she says. "So. Um."
Harry Potter drops his bag in the doorway and waits, and she looks at him — his stupid hair, his careful eyes, the man she has loved since she was old enough to know what loving someone meant — and everything she rehearsed goes completely out of her head.
She holds out the test.
He crosses the room in four steps. Takes it. Looks at it for a long moment.
Looks up at her.
And there it is. There's his face.
She was right. She was completely right.
There it is, she thinks, and something in her chest unclenches all at once, like a fist finally opening.
There it is.