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An owl hit the kitchen window at nine minutes past eight,  which was exactly when James had both cheeks full of toast and had decided the best way to explain the final match of the Hogwarts Quidditch season was to act most of it out with a butter knife. So, a frequent and normal morning in the Potter household. The knife was supposed to be a Chaser, the sugar bowl was apparently the Slytherin Keeper, and the pepper pot had already been knocked onto its side in what James called “a historically accurate foul.” Ginny scolded him. 

“James, seriously! You don't need to make a catastrophe while you're at it,” Ginny said, rescuing the pepper before it rolled off the table. Her hair was pinned at the back of her head, and there was ink on the side of her hand from the sports column she had been trying to finish between telling James not to stab the jam and making sure Lily didn't "marry" the pepper and salt. 

Harry looked up from the Ministry file he had brought home and glanced toward the window. The owl struck the glass again, with less of a flourish, then clung to the sill and glared through the pane with the flat impatience of a bird that had never once considered waiting its turn.

“I’ll get it,” Lily said at once, already halfway out of her chair. Her plait swung over one shoulder as she shoved past James.

Ginny was quicker. She stood, crossed the flagstones, and opened the window. Cool morning air slipped into the kitchen, bringing the smell of wet grass and the rosemary bush outside the door, and the owl hopped in with a sharp little shake of its wings.

It held out one leg. The envelope tied there was thick, cream parchment, and everyone at the table saw the green ink at the same time. James made a sound that started as a gasp and turned into a whoop. His chair scraped backward so hard it hit the dresser, and three spoons jumped in their pot as if they had been startled awake.

“Albus!” James shouted, though Albus was sitting two feet away from him. “It’s here. It’s actually here. Your letter’s here.”

Albus didn't move. His toast had gone cold in his hand, marmalade slipping down one edge toward his thumb, and everyone was staring at him. Harry and Ginny share a worried glance. 

Lily stopped beside Ginny and stared at the envelope as if it had personally insulted her. “Maybe it’s mine,” she said, with the high, careful voice she used when she knew something was not true but wanted everyone else to admit the unfairness of it. "They've gotten the initials wrong, Mum!"

“You’re nine,” James said, grinning at her. “Unless Hogwarts has started taking people early for being short and bossy.”

“I’m not short,” Lily snapped, and the owl ruffled itself as though taking her side. She looked at Ginny instead, her face already tightening. “I can read it for him if he doesn’t want to. I'll do real good, I promise!”

“It has Al’s name on it,” Ginny said, but her voice stayed gentle. She untied the envelope and smoothed the string away from the owl’s leg before handing the bird a bit of bacon from James’s plate. James “He gets first go.”

Harry had put down the file he was reading,  his attention rested fully on the letter in Ginny’s hand. When he looked at Albus, his face looking encouraging at his son.

“Looks like you’ve got post,” Harry said. He kept his hands around his mug, taking a small sip. "You've been waiting all summer of this, son."

Ginny brought it over and held it out without ceremony.  She was smiling, very proudly. He took it shakingly. Having both his parents there, it felt like a lot.

Albus wiped his sticky thumb on a napkin. The envelope felt heavier than it should have, and the green ink seemed too bold against his name. He ran his thumb along the crest, feeling the outline of each house and the big Hogwarts 'H' seal.

Mr. A. Potter.

James began drumming his fingers on the table. Lily climbed back into her chair with a sulky little thud, and Ginny sat down beside Albus rather than returning to her own place. Harry packed away his file into his bag and readjusted his glasses on his face.

The kettle hissed on the stove. Rain ticked softly against the window. Somewhere above them, the rain pattered against the aged roof. Pipes groaned. Harry silently debated on whether he had five seconds to bring his suitcase to his study, he decided against it. Too important of a moment. 

Albus could feel the bile building up at the base of his throat. He was never one who liked too much attention on himself. It's why James loved to bring everyone's attention to him in his most embarrassing moments or Lily screeched at him when she didn't get her way. His parents were usually really good about not creating too much on him. But even today, they were both looking at him. 

“Well?” James said, bouncing once on the balls of his feet though he was still technically sitting. “Open it, then. Go on, Al. You’re making it weird.”

“James,” Ginny said, taking the butter knife from his hand before he could start conducting with it. “Stop egging your brother on. There's absolutely no reason for that!.”

James sat back, but only because the knife had been confiscated. His face was flushed with pleasure. “I’m so not, Mum! This is a major family event.”

Harry gave him a look over the rim of his mug. “James.”

“Dad,” James said. “C'mon, don't leave us all hanging, Al!”

“It's his letter, Jamie, this isn't a court of law with you as the residing judge. Cool it.” Harry set his mug down and glanced at his younger son again. “When you're ready, son.”

Albus couldn't hold off any longer. He slid one finger beneath the seal. The purple wax cracked cleanly, and Lily leaned forward despite herself.

“Careful,” she said. “Don’t rip it.”

Albus looked at her, mostly to drag out James' suffering. “Do you want to do it?”

Lily’s mouth opened, then closed. For a moment her jealousy showed plainly, miserable and hot, before she folded her arms and looked away. “It’s got your name on it. I guess.”

James let out an impatient breath. “Merlin, this is painful.”

Ginny pointed at him without looking. “James.”

“What? I haven’t said anything about the Sorting yet.” He caught Harry’s expression and raised both hands. “Fine. I will save my extremely useful advice for a more appreciative audience.”

“Merlin, help me,” Harry said.

The first sheet came free. Albus unfolded it and saw the crest at the top.

Mr. Albus Severus Potter
Breakfast Table
Potter Manor
England

HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY
Headmistress: Minerva McGonagall

***

Dear Mr. Potter,

We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The school year will begin on 1 September 2017. The Hogwarts Express will depart from King’s Cross Station, Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, at eleven o’clock.

Enclosed is a list of all necessary books and equipment for your first year. Please make sure these items are purchased before the start of term.

We look forward to welcoming you to Hogwarts.

Yours sincerely,

Minerva McGonagall
Headmistress

***

First-Year Supplies

Uniform
Three sets of plain black work robes
One plain black pointed hat
One pair of protective gloves
One winter cloak with silver fastenings

Books
The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1
A History of Magic
Magical Theory
A Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration
One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi
Magical Drafts and Potions
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection

Other Equipment
One wand
One cauldron
One set of glass or crystal phials
One telescope
One set of brass scales

Students may also bring an owl, a cat, or a toad.

First-year students are reminded that broomsticks are not permitted.

***

Albus read the entire letter over and over again. He couldn't believe it. This was his. James couldn't stand it any longer. He sprang up, grabbed two spoons from the pot, and clashed them together like cymbals. The owl shot him a look of deep dislike and flapped onto the top of the dresser.

“Hogwarts!” James announced, far too loudly. “Another Potter released into the wild. The Slytherin of all Slytherins have arrived.”

"Stop it, James!" snapped Harry.

“It is funny,” James said, though he lowered the spoons. “We know he's the most cunning of all..”

“He doesn’t even look happy,” Lily said Her gaze dropped to the equipment list lying under Albus’s hand. “I’d be happy.”

Albus stared at the letter. "It's a big shock, isn't it?!" he snapped.

Ginny gave him a look and touched Lily’s wrist. “You will be, when it’s your turn. It's a big event, your brother is just processing it.”

“That’s ages away.” Lily pulled her hand back. “James got his, and now Al’s got his, and I just get told I’m too little.”

“Mum's right, Lils. It'll come eventually. School doesn't start for a while yet. Let's not focus too much on it, eh? Now have some pancakes. Mum made them just how you like." Harry said. He slid the plate toward her, and Lily took a piece without thanking him. Harry sighed.

Albus wished he could laugh. It was rather a sight, if you were someone outside the family. But, in his eleven years, Albus'd gotten used to his family's dramatics. Well, for the most part.

Ginny leaned closer, her shoulder warm against his. “All right?” she asked softly.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

Harry’s eyes flicked to him. Their matching green eyes met. Albus always hated how his Dad could sense his moods like he's solving a puzzle. Harry was, unfortunately as Granddad Sirius put, equipped with a sixth sense of bullshitting. Man, Mum would have a conniption if she heard him swearing. He only does it, occasionally. He can blame it on Calvin and James, Aunt Lilah's been trying to curb that for years now.

James dropped back into his seat, unable to leave the silence alone for more than three seconds. “You’ll want to get a decent trunk. Dad tried to make me use his old one, which is so outdated. I mean, c'mon Dad, you really expect your heir to use an old luggage trunk.”

“James now you're just making stuff up,” Ginny said. She took the second sheet and scanned the supply list, though Albus had not offered it to her. “Your truck is all beat up now because you and Calvin took it down two flights of stairs. 'Bout made your aunt form a stress ulcer.”

“That was one time.” James pointed at Albus "You should always try something once, then you can say you did it. Simple living.”

“That's horrible advice,” Harry said. “As long as I don't hear you ascending up the walls at school again, I'd really appreciate not dying of a heart attack before I turn forty.”

Albus gave the smallest smile. James brightened at once, encouraged by this tiny success, and leaned across the table. 

"Dad's not being serious. He gave Granddad and Mimi Black plenty of heartskipping moments as a young lad. Granddad told the stories, Dad. And no, they didn't all have to do with Voldemort." He smiles micheviously. "I'll even show you the secret passageways."

“You’re not showing him anything that ends with detention,” Ginny said. "Though I suppose going to the kitchen occasionally is fine."

“I regret passing on the map,” Harry said. “Shouldn't have taken it from Uncle Moony. Teddy is far more responsible. Hope even would....”

“Dad! Don't compare me to the responsible ones. I can never be seen in public again..” James reached for another slice of toast, missed the plate, and knocked over the jam instead. “Oh. Sorry.”

Ginny caught the jar with Seeker reflexes before it spilled. "James, enough. Finish your toast so we can have breakfast in peace, please.”

The kitchen relaxed for a breath. Lily giggled despite herself, and James grinned at Ginny as if being scolded was his favourite pastime. Albus watched them all still a bit nervous. Perhaps, it wouldn't be terrible. As long as James could be a bit more bearable. He glanced towards his brother. Okay, that wouldn't be possible. 

Harry stood and went to the counter, though his tea was still half full. He told Ginny he'd return soon from his study. He just had some paperwork to finish up. It was rather nice having Dad home, and not having to worry about him getting hurt on missions. It was very rare his dad left home for more than a few days and nowhere dangerous.

Ginny came around the table and hugged him properly this time. “Proud of you,” she said.

“Thanks, Mum,” Albus muttered.

“This,” Ginny said, folding the letter carefully along its crease. “is your chance to find out what you love to do and what you're good at. You dad and I will be proud of whoever you become. No matter the house you're in."

Albus looked at the Hogwarts crest again. The lion, eagle, badger, and snake seemed to crowd the top of the page.. James had written home every week during his first term, usually about Quidditch, food, secret passages, and how many times he had seen Nearly Headless Nick at breakfast. His letters had made Hogwarts sound huge and brilliant and completely made for him.

Albus did not feel made for huge and brilliant things. He fit more like a scruffy mouse trying to find scraps in the corner. It sounded intimidating, on top of having his parents. The feeling of suffocation overwhelmed it, but he tried to swallow it down. Let nobody know.

“I don’t want everyone talking about it,” he said. The words came out low, but his mum heard him. "Just for now, maybe us? I just think they'll see me different." 

"If that's what you want." said Ginny. "Then, that's what we'll do."

"We can tell the rest of the family though, right?" asked James.

"James!"

***

By noon, the Burrow was already bursting at the seams. The tables had been dragged outside in a long, uneven line that sloped with the garden, every surface crowded with plates and jugs and bowls that seemed to refill at will.  Nana Weasley had put up a wide patch of shade with a flick of her wand, fastening it between two old apple trees and the corner of the shed, and beneath it Lily and Hugo had claimed the best stretch of grass. They sat back-to-back with their books open, occasionally trading biscuits without looking up, while Nana Weasley passed behind them with a basket of rolls and told three different people to wash their hands. Aunt Hermione was held up in a meeting. Too bloody many, Uncle Ron had grumbled.

Beyond the shade, the garden dropped into organized disorder. Aunt Lilah was chasing little Callum around the vegetable patch, one hand holding up her skirt and the other reaching for the stolen sausage roll clutched in his fist. Callum was laughing so hard he could barely run, which was interesting because he was the most shy of them all. But here, he blended in with the rest.. Near the chicken coop, Sophie and Riley had their heads together with Uncle Fred, all three of them wearing the same innocent expression, which meant something terrible was either already happening or would be shortly.

Above all of it, brooms crossed the sky.

James, Freddie, Calvin, and Lyall had started a Quidditch game that seemed to have no teams, no score, and no rules. He was fine on the ground, very much so. Aunt Lilah shared the sentiment. The Quaffle kept changing hands. Higher still, Mum and Dad were flying in slow circles with Uncle Ron and Uncle George, not playing so much as drifting around and heckling from above. Mum looked as confident on the broom as she did years ago, though Al only saw in the press shots. Dad flew lazily beside her, one hand loose on his broom, looking more at ease than parenting James usally permited.

“James!” Nana Weasley called, as the Quaffle skimmed dangerously close to a jug of pumpkin juice. “If that breaks, you’ll be drinking water until you’re thirty.”

“I didn't do it!” James shouted back.

“Sure, you didn't,” Mum said from above, without even looking down.

Uncle Ron laughed so loudly that he nearly drifted into Uncle George, who shoved him away with one foot and said, “Eyes on the airspace, professional.”

Albus watched the Quaffle sail overhead and nudged the soccer ball away from a clump of daisies with the inside of his shoe. He liked being on the ground. The noise moved over him instead of around him here, and if anyone looked down, they mostly saw Rose first because she was better at demanding the ball.

“Pass it, Al,” Rose said, already running.

Albus passed. She trapped it with her heel, turned too sharply, and almost slipped on the grass before recovering with a quick, annoyed hop.

“Ugh,” she said. "Why'd you kick so hard, Al?"

“How is that my fault? You wanted me to kick it towards you.”

“Not that hard.” Rose kicked the ball back at him. “Like that.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I still don't get why you never wanted to do soccer. There might've been some broken shins with that forcfe.” She darted forward when he tried to move past her, stole the ball neatly, and grinned. “You’re slow today.”

Albus went after her, but she cut across the garden toward the old gnome holes and forced him to stop short before he collided with the laundry basket Nana Weasley left out.  He glanced up automatically when shouting broke out overhead, but it was only Freddie upside down on his broom, laughing while Calvin tried to grab the Quaffle from under his arm.

Rose took advantage and kicked the ball between Albus’s feet.

“Rose.”

“What? Not my fault you weren't paying attention.”

"I thought someone was falling..”

“Someone is always falling around here. Aunt Lilah'll mend their broken bones and send them on their way.” She slowed, waiting for him to catch up. “Now c'mon!”

He went after the ball and booted it back toward the apple trees, harder than he meant to. It rolled past Lily and Hugo, who both lifted their books without moving their bodies. Lily looked up just long enough to say, “If you hit me, I’m telling Mum you did it on purpose.”

“I didn’t hit you, no the very least on purpose,” Albus said.

“Future warning.” She turned a page and settled back against Hugo’s shoulder. Hugo did not look up at all, which Albus found impressive considering James chose that moment to whoop overhead like a banshee.

Rose jogged after the ball and stopped it with one foot. Instead of kicking it back, she stood with the sun behind her and her hair coming loose from its plait, studying him with the sharp look she had inherited from Aunt Hermione and perfected entirely on her own.

“So,” she said, “my letter came yesterday.”

Albus felt the morning tilt slightly. He bent to tighten a shoelace that did not need tightening. “Yeah. Mum said.”

Rose rolled the ball under her foot. “Didn't yours come in the post? Hogwarts send them all out simultaneously.”

“I guess.”

“That’s not an answer.” She waited, and when he stayed crouched over his shoe, she added, “Al, I’m trying to talk to you.”

“I'd rather play soccer.”

“We can do two things.” Rose kicked the ball lightly toward him. “I can, anyway.”

Albus stood and stopped it. The ball rested against his shoe, warm from the sun. Around them, the garden kept going as if nothing had changed: Callum shrieking with delight, Aunt Lilah laughing despite herself, Nana Weasley scolding someone near the tables, James yelling for Freddie to pass before Freddie shouted back that he would rather perish. Molly and Lucy, having freshly arrived, were causing imminent chaos for Uncle Percy and Aunt Audrey. 

Rose didn't get distracted. She had always been good at holding one thought in place until everyone else gave up.

“I don’t understand why you’re acting like this,” she said. “We got our Hogwarts letters. Something we'd been waiting for our entire lives.”

“So it came.” Albus gave the ball a small kick. It rolled three feet and stopped in a patch of uneven grass. “It's not a big deal, Rose. Let it go.”

Rose’s face changed. 

“I thought you were excited,” she said.

“I am.” The answer came too quickly, so he tried again. “I am excited. It’s just overwhelming, that’s all.”

Rose looked at him for a long moment. Overhead, James shouted, “Al! Watch this!” which was exactly the sort of warning that made everyone nearby gawk. A second later, Freddie yelled, “That was not worth watching!” and Uncle Ron’s laughter rolled across the garden.

Albus did not look up this time.

Rose tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Overwhelming because of school, or because everyone’s being weird about it?”

He shrugged. “Both.”

“I guess.” She nudged the ball toward him again, softer now. “It really shouldn't matter, though. What anyone thinks. No need to disappear.”

“I’m not” Albus said, and then stopped because even to him it sounded unconvincing. He glanced toward the tables, where Dad had landed to rescue a bowl of potatoes from the edge before Callum could reach it. “I just don't want random strangers comparing me to my Dad. It's never James or Lily, I'm the one who looks exactly like him. Gets compared to him. I just want one day where that doesn't happen.”

“Fair,” Rose said. “I suppose I'd want the same.”

He stared at her. “Yeah.”

“Don't give them any attention.” She began walking backward, drawing him away from the tables and toward the rougher grass near the orchard. "The media's always harassing Uncle Harry and Aunt Ginny, .”

“Can we just stop talking about it?”

 Rose trapped the ball again. “What animal are you getting?”

“I don’t know.”

“You haven’t thought about it?”

“No.”

Rose looked personally wounded. “How have you not thought about it? You get a pet. Besdies, it's on the list.”

“A cauldron is on the list too, and I haven’t developed an emotional attachment to one. Seriously, Rosie.”

” She considered him, ignored him, then said, “Owl?”

“Maybe.”

“Cat?”

“Maybe.”

“Toad?”

“No.”

“It's important to talk about.” Rose tapped the ball from foot to foot, thinking. “I might get an owl. Practical. But cats are better company. Dad says an owl is more useful, Mum says usefulness isn’t everything, and Uncle George said to get something that won’t judge me on a daily occasion. What about classes?”

Albus made a face. She never knows when to stop.  “I haven’t even got a wand yet. How am I supposed to know what I want to participate in?”

“No one knows before they start, i guess.”

“James knew.”

“James said he knew. He's a bit of a show-off.” Rose took the ball out of his hands and dropped it neatly onto the grass. “Try again. What do you want to learn?”

The question should have been easier, but it sat inside him with the same weight as the envelope on the kitchen table.

Rose waited. She was not gentle about much, but she could be patient when it mattered.

“Charms,” Albus said at last.

Her eyebrows lifted. “Really?”

“Maybe.”  Was his Dad good at Charms?  He was at Defense. Uncle Rem wouldn't even be teaching him, he stopped teaching there a good five years ago.

“I'm just curious is all.” She kicked the ball toward him, slow enough that he could stop it without thinking. “Why Charms?”

He kept his eyes on the grass. “They seem useful. Fixing things. Moving things. Making small things work better.”

“That sounds like you.”

He looked up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It sounds like you,” Rose repeated, as if it were obvious. “You notice small things. You’re always fixing Lily’s messes so your mum and dad don't notice. You fixed her broken clock when she threw it against the wall.”

“I didn’t fix the clock. Aunt Lilah and Granddad did.”

“Well, you brought it to them”

Albus felt his ears warm and kicked the ball a little too hard. Rose chased it, laughing when it bounced off a tree root and came back toward her. She stopped it with her knee, badly, and the ball rolled sideways into the shadow of the shed.

“Charms,” she said, retrieving it. “Good. What else?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do.”

He gave her a look. “You’ve become very bossy since breakfast.”

“I was bossy before breakfast. It's one of my many admirable traits.” Rose dribbled toward him. “Potions?”

“Maybe. If the teacher isn’t horrible.”

“History of Magic?”

“You can want that enough for both of us.”

“I do, actually.” She didn't appear embarrassed. “Everyone says it’s boring, but that’s because everyone says everything old is boring until it explodes or curses someone.”

Albus laughed despite himself. “You sound like Aunt Hermione.”

“Thank you.” Rose accepted this as her due and swung the ball around him. “What about Quidditch?”

“No.”

“That was fast.”

“Brooms and I don't agree.” Albus glanced up just as James and Freddie cut past each other so closely their broomtails crossed. “And I don’t want everyone staring to see if I fly like Dad. I just don't want any comparisons if I can help it. I'd not be good at that.”

Rose followed his gaze. Above them, Dad was back in the air, flying slowly with Mum beside him. He din't look famous from here. He looked like Albus’s dad, squinting into the sun while Uncle George said something that made Mum roll her eyes.

“You don’t have to play,” Rose said. “You can just watch. Spectators are what make it interesting”

“That’s what I want.” Albus paused, surprised by how sure he sounded. “I want to watch matches and not have anyone ask why I’m not on a broom.”

“Then sit with me. I’ll ask questions loudly enough to annoy James.”

“You already do that.”

“Then I’ll continue my work.” Rose passed to him again. “What else?”

The ball came to his foot, and he did not kick it right away. The orchard smelled of warm leaves and cut grass. From the tables came a burst of applause; Uncle Fred had apparently made a cherry tart salute Nana Weasley, who was telling him she was not impressed while clearly being so. Callum barreled past with Aunt Lilah close behind, now covered in flour for reasons Albus had missed entirely.

“I want to find somewhere quiet,” Albus said.

Rose softened at once. “At Hogwarts?”

“Yeah. Sometimes.” He scratched at the back of his neck. “Just somewhere people don’t keep looking over to see what I’m doing.”

“There must be loads of places. It’s a castle.”

“Not from what the older kids say. Tons of forbidden, dangerous or occupited spots..”

“James is not a reliable academic source.”

“In some cases, he is.”

Rose conceded this with a tilt of her head. “Fine. We’ll find one. A library corner, maybe. Or an unused classroom. Just nowhere illegal. I’m not getting expelled before Christmas because you need quiet, brooding time.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“You’re welcome.” She hesitated, then asked, “Do you want us to be in the same House?”

The question struck more quietly than the others. Albus looked toward Lily and Hugo under the shade, heads bent together, completely safe in their patch of ordinary afternoon. He had imagined the Sorting more often than he wanted to admit, always with the same awful moment: walking away from the stool toward a table that was not occupied with any members of his family. His family was spread out decently, except in Slytherin. The forbidden house, in his mind at least. 

“Yes,” he said.

Rose did not gloat over the admission. “Me too.”

“And if we're not?”

“That's what breakfast is for, they don't have strict adhereance anymore, following the Battle.” She answered so promptly that he knew she had already thought about it. “And after classes, and in the library, and outside whenever we can.”

“Alright, yeah.”

“Exactly.” Rose gave him a smaller, steadier smile. “Houses aren’t everything, you know”

"Sure, but they're basically your family for seven years, aren't they?”

“We already are family.” She kicked the ball to him. “Hogwarts can sort us however it likes. All of us, we were family first.”

For a moment he could not think of an answer. The tightness that had been sitting under his ribs since the owl hit the kitchen window eased a little. Rose looked away first, but then decided against so.

“Oi!” James shouted from above. “Are you two holding a feelings conference or playing?”

Rose tipped her head back. “Shut up, James.”

“That wasn't no,” Freddie called. “Why don't you two get on some brooms and join us? You chicken?”

Calvin swooped lower, going upside down above the broom, grinning. Aunt Lilah yelled at him to get back upright or she'd shove his broom in the incinerator. Calvin ignored her. “Al, tell Rose she’s losing.”

“I’m winning,” Rose said.

“There’s no goal,” Lyall pointed out. "Is there?"

“And you're not playing, now are you. Go back to your daft game.” Rose planted both hands on her hips and looked up at them with such annoyance. “Try not to fall on us.”

James dipped lower, clearly delighted to be involved where no one had invited him. “Now, now, Rosie, no need to get vicious.”

“Maybe shut up then,” Rose said.

“Such a feisty one.”

Dad drifted close enough to hear, his glasses catching the light. “Now what is this all about... this time?”

“Dear Rose here is not all interested in interacting with her loving cousins,” James said. “Now she's picturing throwing that ball at us. Menacingly.”

Uncle Ron, hovering above Dad, just looked bored. "Rose, Mum and I have talked about this attitude of yours. Cool it. And James, I know you, stop goading her on.”

Mum angled down beside them, her expression amused. “Seriously, James.”

“I am astonished that you would possibly think I could be capable of that,” James said.

“James, this is a frequent occurrence. Go on your way, now,” Dad said. His broom lowered until he was near enough to look at Albus properly without making it obvious to everyone else. “You all right down there?”

Albus rolled the ball under his shoe. He could feel Rose beside him, not answering for him, not pushing either. “Yeah.”

Dad nodded, accepting it without making him prove it. “Good.”

The adults rose again, returning to their slow loop over the garden. James lingered just long enough to waggle his eyebrows at Albus before the older boys returned to their game.

Rose watched them go. “You know, your brother is going to be unbearable on the train.”

“He’s unbearable every day.”

Nana Weasley called then, her voice carrying over the whole garden with the force of a dinner bell. “Food's ready. Everyone come get it before the gnomes start raiding it. Fred, what the hell are you doing?.”

Uncle Fred looked across the table with perfect innocence as a row of strawberries began marching toward the cream jug. “I’m encouraging independence.”

“Nope, I don't even want to know,” Nana said, though she was already smiling.

Brooms descended in a rush of wind and laughter. James landed badly on purpose and tumbled into the grass, Freddie tripped over him, Calvin claimed victory and Lyall argued that Calvin had spent half the match holding the Quaffle under one arm. Mum came down neatly, Dad beside her, while Uncle Ron complained that Uncle George had side swiped him on the way down. Aunt Lilah finally caught Callum near the bread basket, causing him to shriek in delight. Riley and Sophie'd clambered off somewhere.

Albus and Rose walked back together, the soccer ball tucked under Albus’s arm.  At the table, James shoved over to make room and immediately began explaining some random rules at school that made literally no sense to anyone but James.

Rose sat opposite him and stole a roast potato from the edge of his plate.

“Family, I swear,” she said under her breath.

Albus looked at the crowded table, the brooms abandoned in the grass, Dad leaning over to wipe dirt from Callum’s cheek, Mum laughing at something Uncle Ron had said, James talking with his hands so wildly that Freddie had to rescue his glass. The Burrow roared around him, warm and impossible and full of people who would make too much of everything because they loved him and did not always know how to do it quietly.

He nudged another potato toward Rose before she could steal it herself.

“Yup,” he said.

***

Albus knew it was going to be a bad day before anyone said the words Diagon Alley, and afterward he could never quite explain how. It was the sort of knowing that settled in the stomach rather than the head, a low, grey certainty that arrived with the morning light and refused to be argued with over breakfast.

It wasn't one thing. One thing would have been easy to point at, easy to name and set aside. It was James thumping down the stairs too loud and too early, talking before he'd even reached the bottom. It was Lily asking twice, in nearly the same breath, whether they were going to look at the owls, then a third time as though the first two hadn't counted. It was Mum checking the clock against the wall with that brisk, herding look she got when she wanted everyone out of the door before an argument could find somewhere to start and put down roots. And it was Dad at the kitchen window, his tea going cold and untouched in his hand, watching the garden the way he watched a room before he let his children walk into it — like it owed him an answer and was being slow about giving it.

Albus sat at the end of the table and pushed his eggs around the plate, breaking the yolk and herding it into the white and back again, until the whole lot had gone cold and rubbery and any chance of eating it had passed.

Ginny noticed. She always did; it was one of the unnerving and reassuring things about her. What she didn't do — and Albus loved her for it, in the wordless way he loved most things about her — was ask whether he was all right where James could hear and turn it into a thing.

"You'll want a jumper," she said instead, setting the teapot down within his reach.

"I'm fine."

"It was warm yesterday. The Alley gets draughty down by the bank." A pause, while she looked at him over the rim of her own cup. "You're wearing one anyway."

James came in then with his hair still dripping onto his collar and his shirt buttoned one hole out of true, so the whole thing sat crooked across his chest. He snatched a piece of toast off the rack without breaking stride and dropped into the chair directly across from Albus, all knees and elbows and untucked energy.

"We're doing lunch with Neville, yeah?" he said, around the toast.

"And Hannah," Harry said, turning from the window at last. "And the baby."

Lily's head came up like a flag going up a pole. "Anthony."

"Yes. Anthony."

"Can I hold him?"

"That's up to Hannah."

Lily's whole face folded into a scowl, as though this were a deliberate and personal cruelty that Harry had arranged especially for her. "She'll say yes."

"Not if you march in expecting it," Ginny said, without looking up from her tea. "Babies aren't library books, Lily. You can't put a hold on one and wait by the door."

James snorted into his toast hard enough to send crumbs across the table. Albus kept his eyes down and wished, with a fervour that surprised him, that the morning was already over and they were all home again with the day safely behind them. There was nothing wrong with Neville and Hannah. He liked Neville — properly liked him, not the careful, polite liking he kept ready for most of his parents' friends. He liked that Neville never spoke to him the way other adults did, as though Albus were supposed to be impressive, as though there were a performance owed and overdue. Neville just talked to him like he was a person who happened to be there, which sounded like the simplest thing in the world and somehow almost never was.

The problem wasn't the lunch. The problem was the Alley.

Ever since his letter had come — thick parchment, green ink, his own name looping across the front in a hand he didn't recognise — the whole world seemed to have grown ears overnight. People had always looked at Dad; that was old news, as ordinary and unremarkable as weather. But now Albus could feel the looking slide sideways off Harry and settle onto him, light and cold as a draught under a door. It lived in the little pause that came after someone said Harry Potter, the half-second where the name hung in the air and waited. It lived in the quick drop of an adult's eyes to the children walking beside him, doing sums. It lived in the murmur that started up the moment they'd gone past, low and busy, like water finding a crack.

Dad had told him, more than once, that he didn't have to perform being excited for anyone.

It hadn't stopped everyone else from expecting the performance.

By the time they reached the Floo, Albus had a grey smear of soot on one cuff that he knew would spread, a headache pressing in behind his eyes like a thumb, and Lily in tears of pure outrage because James had told her, with great solemnity, that newborns bit.

"They do not bite," she said, voice cracking on the injustice of it. "Tell him, Mum."

James shrugged, infuriatingly calm, hands in his pockets. "Met a lot of newborns this morning, have you? Bit soon to be calling yourself the expert."

"Enough." Ginny caught his sleeve before he could step into the grate, her fingers closing on the fabric with the easy speed of long practice. "We are going to lunch. We are not, on the way, turning that woman's baby into a debate. Are we understood."

It wasn't a question. James held up both hands, the picture of wounded innocence, and stepped into the green roar of the fire. He was gone before the flames had finished swallowing him.

Albus went next, the powder gritty between his fingers, the words sticking briefly in his dry throat. The world spun green and the grates flickered past too fast to see, and then he landed with the usual graceless stumble and caught himself hard against cool brick, his palm scraping. Harry came through behind him a moment later, settling onto his feet the way he settled into everything — quietly, already looking around. Then Ginny, with Lily's hand locked firmly in hers and Lily's expression still mutinous.

The Alley was busy enough to make Albus's skin pull tight across the back of his neck. Children pressed up against the shop windows in clusters, lists crushed in their fists, breath fogging the glass. Parents loitered in the doorways behind them, counting coins out into open palms, counting the weeks until term, calling names that bounced and tangled off the high crooked walls. The owls in Eeylops were screaming about something, a ragged chorus of it, and the apothecary three doors down had propped its door wide, letting out a smell so sharp and green and chemical it made his eyes prickle even from across the cobbles.

Harry didn't take his hand. He hadn't, in public, for years now — Albus had made it painfully clear, somewhere around his ninth birthday, that he hated being handled like he was small and likely to wander off. But Harry walked close, closer than the crowd strictly required, his shoulder a steady presence at Albus's right. Ginny walked close on the other side. And Albus understood exactly what the arrangement was, the two of them quietly building a wall around him out of their own bodies, and he hated that he understood it — hated that he could see the care for what it was, a thing assembled in response to a threat, instead of just feeling looked after.

A witch outside Flourish and Blotts looked straight at Harry, her conversation stopping mid-word.

Harry gave her a short nod, the kind he gave a hundred times a day, and kept walking without slowing.

She turned to the woman next to her the instant they'd passed and said something behind her cupped hand, her eyes following them down the Alley. Albus didn't catch the words. He'd long since stopped needing to catch the words; the shape of it was always the same.

James caught it too. The grin slid clean off his face, and for once — for once — he didn't reach for anything to put in the gap where it had been. He just walked, hands jammed deeper into his pockets, jaw set, suddenly looking less like himself.

The Three Broomsticks sat past a tight bend in the Alley, where the buildings leaned in close overhead and the light went thin. Inside it was dimmer and far quieter than the street, the air warm and thick with woodsmoke and the malty smell of butterbeer. The front room was packed, every table taken, but Neville had a private room held at the back, behind a low door with worn brass fittings. Harry glanced into it before they were properly through — checked the corners, the second exit, the window — a small thing, barely a movement at all, done out of a habit older than any of his children. And Albus, watching, saw Neville notice him do it, and saw Neville decide not to mention it.

Neville got up from the table to greet them with Anthony tucked carefully against his shoulder, one broad hand splayed across the baby's back. He moved slowly, the way new parents did, as though the floor might not be entirely trustworthy. Hannah sat by the window in the better light, looking tired and easy and worn soft at the edges, one hand resting near a cup of tea she had very plainly forgotten about some time ago.

"Harry," Neville said warmly.

"Sorry we're late."

"You're not."

"Now there's a first," Ginny said, leaning past him to kiss Hannah's cheek.

Hannah smiled up at her, faint and genuine and exhausted all at once. "I'm taking it as a good sign. We need a few of those this week."

Lily had abandoned all interest in everyone over the age of one and was hovering at Neville's elbow, working very hard at looking patient and managing it about as well as a kettle manages to look cold. Anthony slept on, oblivious, against his father's shoulder — impossibly small, his mouth slack and working faintly at nothing, one fist curled up tight near his own cheek as though he were holding onto something only he could see.

"He's so small," Lily breathed, the word coming out reverent.

"He'll take that to heart later," Neville said gravely. "Sensitive about it already."

She looked genuinely appalled, her eyes going wide. "He can't hear me."

"He hears tone," Hannah said from the window. "Mostly mine. At three o'clock in the morning, at considerable length."

James leaned in from where he'd stalled near the door, craning for a proper look without quite committing to getting closer. "Does he take after you or after Hannah?"

"Right now," Neville said, tipping his head down to study his son with an expression of helpless, undisguised fondness, "he mostly takes after a raisin. But a very fine raisin. Best raisin I've ever seen, if I'm honest."

Ginny caught Harry's eye over the top of Lily's head, and Albus, watching the silent thing pass between his parents, could tell that she was pleased — not soppy about it, she was never that, but warmed, quietly and from the inside, by the sight of Neville Longbottom standing there holding his son like the boy was made of spun glass. And something in Harry's face went soft to match it, an unguarded second, before he covered it the way he always covered those seconds — by pulling off his glasses and polishing them on the hem of his shirt, frowning at the lenses as though they'd done something wrong.

Albus took the chair against the wall, the one with the best view of the door, without quite letting himself notice that was why he'd chosen it.

Neville clocked it. Of course he clocked it. But he let it lie. He passed Anthony carefully back to Hannah, waited until she'd got the baby properly settled against her with the small fierce competence of someone who had done it ten thousand times in a fortnight, and then he came around the table and sat down across from Albus, unhurried, like a man with nowhere else in the world he needed to be.

"So the letter came, then," he said.

Albus nodded.

"Big week."

"Yeah."

Neville took the one-word answer without trying to pry it open into more, without that bright, leaning interest most adults brought to bear when they'd decided a child needed drawing out. He just nodded, and reached for the water, and let a comfortable space sit in the middle of the table. "When mine turned up," he said after a moment, "Gran cried so hard she frightened the poor owl half to death. It dropped the letter and bolted straight back out the window. We had to send off an apology."

That got Albus to look up, almost against his will.

"She'd more than half convinced herself I wouldn't get one at all," Neville went on, easy and unembarrassed, turning the glass slowly between his fingers. "And I'd more than half convinced myself the owl had simply got the wrong house and someone would be along to take it back. Pair of us, weren't we. In a right old state, the both of us, over a bit of parchment."

Some of the weight that had been sitting on Albus's chest all morning shifted, just enough to let a breath under it. "Were you excited?"

"Yes." Neville drank some of the water at last. "Also sick to my stomach. Also absolutely dead certain that every other person in that castle was going to know more than me about everything, and that I'd be found out by Tuesday."

"They did, though," James put in, dropping himself into a chair and leaning his arms on the table. "Loads of people did. Know more."

Neville turned his head and looked at him — just looked, with no sharpness in it at all.

"I mean—" James started, the colour rising up his neck.

"I know what you mean." Neville's voice didn't harden in the slightest, which was somehow worse for James than if it had, and Albus watched his brother feel that. "Still."

James shut his mouth and busied himself with the cutlery.

Harry, in the seat beside Albus now, gave Neville a short look of quiet, complicated thanks over the top of his glass. Albus hated that look — hated the whole grown-up machinery of it, the silent passing of his welfare back and forth between them like a parcel. He just hated it less, fractionally less, than he would have a week ago.

Lunch arrived on heavy plates carried two to an arm, and for a good while the room filled up with ordinary, blessed noise: cutlery scraping, the thunk of a jug set down, Lily putting careful and increasingly specific questions to Hannah about exactly what Anthony could and could not yet do, James eating like a boy who genuinely feared the food might be repossessed, Ginny warning him once about the speed of it and then, when he ignored her, letting him scald the roof of his mouth in instructive peace. Harry talked to Neville about the Hogwarts greenhouses, and then about which of the staff were and weren't speaking to one another this year, and then about nothing in particular at all, the easy nothing of two people who'd known each other most of their lives.

And Albus, with food in front of him and the wall solid at his back, very nearly forgot the Alley was out there waiting at all.

The door opened.

The man who came through it wore a plain dark waistcoat and carried an empty tray balanced on one hand, and for the first half-second he looked, completely, like a member of staff come to clear or to take an order. Then Harry's head snapped round toward the movement, faster than thought, and Ginny's hand stopped dead in the air halfway to her glass, and the half-second curdled into something else entirely.

The man smiled. It was a practised smile, warm and wide and entirely without warmth, the smile of someone who had used it as a tool many times before.

"Mr Potter. Tobias Vale, Wizarding Wire. Just a moment of your time — I'll be in and out, you won't know I was here."

Harry was on his feet at once, the chair grinding back. "No."

Vale kept coming as though Harry hadn't made a sound, gliding forward into the room. A quill slid out from inside his sleeve and floated up to hover at his shoulder, and Albus watched it begin to scratch away at a roll of parchment that unspooled in the air beside it, writing already, recording already, before a single useful word had been spoken.

"There's a great deal of interest in your son's letter, you'll appreciate," Vale said, conversational, his eyes moving round the table and totting up what he found. "Albus Severus Potter — first year, this September. Quite a public moment, for a family like yours—"

Ginny stood. She didn't rush it. Her voice came out low and flat and terribly precise, each word set down separately like a stone. "You're leaving."

Vale's eyes flicked to her, weighed her, and then slid past her — straight to Albus, pinning him where he sat against the wall.

"Albus. Are you looking forward to Hogwarts? Any nerves at all about living up to your father?"

Albus couldn't move. The room had gone very far away and very loud at the same time, and his own name in this stranger's mouth felt like a hand laid flat on the back of his neck.

Harry crossed the room fast enough that his abandoned chair rocked up onto two legs and hung there before crashing back down with a crack that made Lily jump.

"You keep his name," Harry said, "out of your mouth."

The whole room went quiet. The front room beyond the door, the private room, all of it — quiet, except for the small, relentless, obscene scratch of the quill, which hadn't stopped, which was writing all of this down too.

Neville rose without hurry and went to the door. No raised voice. No threat, no wand, nothing for the quill to make a meal of. He simply walked over and put himself in front of it, square and solid and immovable, and that was all it took.

Vale's smile thinned at the edges. "Professor Longbottom. Surely a man in your position appreciates that this is a matter of legitimate public interest."

Neville looked down at the empty tray still balanced in the man's hand. "You came in here," he said slowly, "pretending to work."

"I was shown through."

"No," said Hannah, perfectly calm from her place by the window, Anthony cradled against her and beginning to stir. "You weren't. The staff door is the one behind you, and you came in by it badly. Nobody shows anybody through that door."

Something flickered in Vale's eyes — a small recalculation.

Harry put out his hand, palm up, steady. "Wand. On the table."

Vale gave a short laugh, performing it for the parchment. "You can't possibly be serious."

"Wand."

"This is a public house."

"This room is private."

"I'm asking a few harmless questions—"

"You're cornering a child."

Vale lifted his chin and scrambled visibly to keep hold of the story even as it slid out from under him, narrating his own defeat into the hovering quill. "Auror Potter refuses to answer one harmless question about his son's education. Is that the official Ministry line?"

Ginny reached up, plucked the quill out of the air mid-word, and snapped it cleanly in two.

The crack of it was tiny, almost nothing. Albus felt it in his back teeth.

Vale stared at her, the colour going up in his face. "That is interference. Ministry interference, with the free press, and I have—"

She dropped both broken halves onto his tray, where they rolled and came to rest. "That," she said, "was me being polite."

Harry's badge was suddenly in his palm, catching the lamplight. "Tobias Vale. You're under arrest — trespass, harassment of a minor, and use of an enchanted recording device without consent. Wand on the table. I will not ask you again."

For a long moment nobody moved. Then Vale's wand clattered down onto the wood.

Harry bound him with a single flick, almost lazy. The cords whipped out of nowhere and snapped tight around the man's wrists and his elbows, pinning his arms, and Vale wrenched against them once, twice, and then pitched his voice toward the open door and the crowded room beyond it.

"I'd ask any witnesses present to note that Auror Potter has used force on a working journalist who—"

Harry took one single step closer.

Vale stopped talking.

"Walk," Harry said.

Neville opened the door. The room beyond fell quiet almost before it was fully open, as though the hush had been standing out there waiting its turn the whole time. Faces turned, one after another, a slow ripple of them. Somebody half rose out of a chair to see better and then thought better of it and sat back down. Albus saw eyes, and open mouths, and more eyes, a whole roomful of strangers drinking it in, and his name was going to be in all of those mouths by nightfall and he knew it.

Harry walked Vale straight out through the middle of all of it, looking neither left nor right, his face carved out of something that wouldn't move. Ginny went after him with Vale's wand held flat in her hand.

Nobody left in the private room said a single word until Anthony, picking up on something in the air the way babies do, screwed up his small red face and began to cry in earnest.

Hannah looked down at him, then over at the door, and bounced him gently. "Quite right," she murmured into the top of his head. "I'd object too."

Lily had gone pale and silent. She edged her chair sideways, the legs juddering on the floor, until it was pressed up against Albus's. "Are you okay?" she whispered.

He wanted, badly, to snap at her — wanted to put the awful feeling somewhere, and she was the nearest place. He didn't. "Yes."

"You're not, though."

"Lily," James said. Quietly, for James. There was none of the usual needle in it.

She looked round at him, surprised, and went still.

Neville came back to the table once Harry and Ginny had disappeared into the front room. He didn't sit down. He just came and stood near Albus — close enough to be a presence, to be there, but far enough off that it didn't feel like a door closing or a wall going up.

"That was vile," he said simply.

Albus looked at the two broken halves of the quill, lying on the tray. "He asked me like I had to answer him. Like I owed it to him."

"Yes," Neville said. "He did."

"I didn't, though. Answer."

"You never had to."

James was staring at the door, his face white and tight, both hands curled into fists out of sight beneath the table — Albus could tell from the set of his shoulders, the way the knuckles would be showing white. "Dad's going to lose it," he said. "Properly."

"No," said Neville, with a quiet certainty that landed in the room and steadied it. "Your dad knows exactly what he's doing. Watch."

Albus wasn't sure that helped. There was a version of Dad that lost his temper, and a version that went smooth and still and terrible, and the second one frightened him far more.

Harry came back a few minutes later, Ginny half a step behind him. His face had gone smooth and still — which, Albus had learned long ago, was the one to be frightened of, the one that meant the anger had gone somewhere deep and cold and organised. Ginny's anger was the cleaner kind, the kind that lived right out on the surface where you could see it and warm your hands at it.

"Intake's got him," Harry said, low. "I've given a first statement. It's done, for now."

Hannah nodded. "Good."

Harry turned to Neville. "I'm sorry. Your day. The baby. All of it."

Neville shook his head, slow and final. "Save it for someone who's earned it. You didn't do this. He did."

Harry sat back down in the seat beside Albus and, for a moment, didn't say anything at all. He set his hands flat on the table and looked at them.

Then, very low, almost to himself: "He had no right. None."

Albus kept his eyes on the grain of the wood. "People ask you things all the time, though."

"That's different."

"It feels the same."

Ginny pulled out the chair across from them and sat, folding her hands. "Then," she said, looking at Albus until he had to look back, "we treat it like it matters. All right? We treat it like it matters."

Albus didn't answer. He didn't trust his voice to come out the size he wanted it to.

They stayed and finished lunch, because getting up and walking out straight away would have felt too much like running, and because Hannah needed to feed Anthony before any of them went anywhere. The food had gone lukewarm and tasted of cardboard and nothing. Lily hardly spoke, which was so unlike her it left a hole in the table. James gave up trying to fill the quiet with chatter and just pushed things slowly around his plate, and somehow that — quiet James — made the whole thing feel stranger and worse than the silence would have managed on its own.

On the walk back through the Alley, Harry kept Albus on the inside of the pavement, between himself and the shopfronts, away from the open street. Ginny had Lily firmly by the hand. James stayed close on Albus's other side and didn't make one single joke the entire way, not even when they passed the joke shop.

That, more than anything else, was how Albus knew exactly how bad it had really been.

***

At home, the house felt too still, the way a room feels after a clock has stopped and you can't yet work out what's wrong.

Lily was taken up by Ginny after extracting a solemn promise that she would see Anthony again very soon. James hung about the sitting room for a bit, twitchy and useless, picking things up and putting them down, before he took himself out into the garden and started kicking at the loose stones along the path, a sharp little crack of sound every few seconds. Harry vanished into the kitchen and didn't reappear, and the house arranged itself around the quiet, until the evening Prophet hit the window just before tea with a soft, ordinary thump.

The owl dropped it onto the sill and was gone into the grey before anyone reached the glass.

Ginny brought it in and unfolded it.

Her face went first. Albus, watching from the doorway, saw it happen — saw it close like a window.

Harry was already moving toward her. "Rita?"

She held it out to him without a word. "Yes."

The headline took up half the front page, in type fat enough to read across the room.

POTTER'S PRIVATE WAR: HEAD AUROR ACCUSED OF MANHANDLING REPORTER IN DIAGON ALLEY

Underneath, in smaller columns that Albus's eye snagged on and couldn't stop reading, Rita Skeeter had found a great deal to say. There was a paragraph about secrecy, and one about the use of excessive force on a man simply doing his job, and one about public accountability and a public servant's duty to it, and threaded all the way through, like a rotten seam, Harry Potter's "long-standing and well-documented hostility toward press scrutiny." And there — Albus caught it a half-second before Harry's hand came down and folded the paper firmly shut — there was his own name, in the second paragraph, set down in black ink for anyone in the country to read.

"She named him," Harry said. His voice had gone very quiet. "She actually named him."

Ginny's voice could have frosted the inside of the windows. "Of course she did. It's the whole point. He's the reason it sells."

James came in from the garden then, the back door banging behind him, his hair blown into chaos and his cheeks red from the cold. "What's happened? What is it?"

Harry didn't answer quite fast enough.

James's eyes went to the folded paper in his father's hand. "Is that about today?"

"Upstairs," Harry said.

James stopped dead where he stood, halfway across the room. "I'm not Lily."

"No. You're thirteen, and I said upstairs."

James's whole face closed up like a fist. "Fine. Brilliant."

He turned to go, shoulders rigid.

Harry caught it a beat too late, the way you catch a glass after it's already left the edge of the table. "James—"

James paused without turning round.

Harry let out a long breath and dragged a hand down over his jaw and chin. "That came out wrong. I'm sorry. That was — that came out wrong."

James glanced back at that. Still furious, still stiff with it, but listening now, the door not quite shut. "Sounded clear enough to me."

"I'm angry," Harry said. "And I pointed it at the wrong person. That's all that was. I'm sorry."

For a moment James just looked at him, weighing it. Then something in him eased a fraction.

Harry folded the paper again, smaller, tight enough to crease a hard line straight through the middle of the headline. "You can stay," he said. "You're not reading the article. Those are the terms."

James came back across the room, slowly, and perched himself on the arm of the big chair, near but not in it. "Yeah," he said. "All right. Fair enough."

Albus had drifted to stand by the window, arms folded across his chest, and from there the whole scene felt as though it were happening behind glass. He felt strangely far from all of it, as if the headline downstairs were about some other boy who simply happened to share his name and his face and his exact small place in the world.

"It doesn't matter," he said, to the window.

Ginny looked over at him. "It matters."

"Everyone knows anyway. They already know."

"Knowing your name," Harry said, "doesn't give them a claim on it. It isn't the same thing."

And Albus turned on him, the anger coming up out of nowhere, fast and hot and surprising even to himself — because Harry sounded so certain, so settled in his own rightness, and because Harry was the entire reason, the original reason, that any of these people knew the name at all.

"It wasn't yours they used this time, though. Was it."

Harry went completely still.

Ginny didn't step in. James looked down at his own hands. The room waited.

Harry took it. Albus watched him take it, full in the chest, watched it land — and watched him not flinch away from it, not reach for an excuse, not soften it into something easier to hold.

"No," Harry said at last, and his voice came out rougher than before, scraped down to something honest. "It wasn't. It was yours."

The room held that, for a moment. Nobody moved to fill it.

Then Harry crossed to the fireplace and took a pinch of Floo powder from the pot on the mantel. His movements had gone clipped and practical now, one thing after the next — and Albus understood, dimly, that the practical Harry was easier for everyone to be around than the soft one from a second ago, the briskness a kind of mercy.

"Kingsley Shacklebolt," Harry said into the grate.

The flames leapt up emerald green, and Kingsley's broad face was there in them almost at once, grave and deeply, entirely unsurprised.

"I've seen it," Kingsley said, before Harry could begin.

"Then you know why I'm calling."

"I do."

"I want legal limits on press contact with my children," Harry said, fast and clear, a man who'd been drafting this in his head since the Alley. "Approaches in public. Photographs. Recording charms. Anything to do with the school. Anything that ties their names to where they are, or where they're going to be."

Kingsley listened without breaking in once, his head tilted slightly.

Ginny moved up to stand at Harry's shoulder. "Make it wider than that," she said into the fire. "Don't make it Potter rules — that's exactly what she wants, it plays straight into her hands. Make it child privacy, full stop. Children of public figures. Witnesses. Victims. Anyone they decide is worth chasing across a front page."

"That," said Kingsley after a beat, "is by far the stronger route. It's harder to argue against and harder to repeal. Emergency guidance can go out tonight. A formal proposal tomorrow morning."

Harry's hand tightened on the edge of the mantel until the knuckles stood out. "And Vale?"

"Held, pending review. I'll need your report."

"Before midnight. You'll have it."

"Good. And, Harry — no public statement from you. None. Not a word."

Harry's mouth twisted. "Wasn't planning to make one."

Ginny gave him a look from the side.

"Wasn't," Harry insisted.

Kingsley's dark eyes moved between the two of them, reading the whole marriage in a glance. "Plan harder," he said, and the flames dropped and took his face with them.

Harry called Hermione next.

She came up in the fire with parchment already gripped in one hand and her hair coming loose from its clip in exactly the way it did when she'd been working at something for hours and forgotten to eat. "I'm drafting the language now," she said, before the green had even settled. "I've got most of a framework."

"Hello, Hermione," Ginny said.

"Hello. I'm livid." She said it briskly, as a fact, and then her eyes cut straight to Harry. "Now. No statement. No correction. No letter to the editor, no word through a friendly source, no quote slipped to someone who owes you. Rita is fishing, Harry. She has put a hook in the water and she is waiting. Do not be the fish."

Harry leaned a shoulder against the mantelpiece. "I know."

"You know things," Hermione said, "and then you go and do them anyway. I've watched you do it for twenty years."

"That," James muttered, just loud enough, to no one in particular, "is the whole family, that is."

Ginny shot him a look. He found something fascinating to study on the ceiling.

Then Hermione's eyes found Albus, over by the window, and her whole face softened — though not into pity, which he'd have hated, and which she'd known him long enough to know he'd have hated. "Albus," she said gently. "I'm sorry. Truly."

He shrugged, the movement tight. "It's fine."

"It isn't," Harry said, sharp, not unkindly.

The sting started up behind Albus's eyes again, hot and unwelcome. "What do you want me to say?"

"Nothing," Harry said, and turned to look at him properly. "That's the whole point, Al. You don't owe anyone the right answer. You don't owe them an answer at all."

Hermione nodded through the flames. "And at school — if anyone asks you about the article, you are allowed to simply walk away from them. Mid-sentence. You don't have to be clever or polite about it. That's allowed, and no one will think less of you for it."

"And if they keep on?" Albus asked. "If they follow me?"

"Then it becomes a staff matter," Hermione said. "And it stops being yours to carry."

"And a parent matter," Harry added.

Albus looked at him. "That sounds worse, somehow."

"It might be embarrassing," Harry admitted. "I won't lie to you about that. But embarrassing is a long way better than being cornered with no one coming. I'll take embarrassing every single time."

Ginny came across the room and stood beside Albus. She didn't put her arm around him — not with everyone watching, not when she knew it would make him squirm and pull away. She just rested her hand against the back of his shoulder for a second, firm and warm and brief, there and then gone before he could decide how to feel about it.

"You are allowed," she said, "to be rude to people who are using you. I want you to remember that. It isn't bad manners. It's self-defence."

Lily, it turned out, had crept halfway down the stairs and was sitting on the steps in her socks, silent, taking the whole thing in. "Can I be rude to Rita Skeeter?" she asked.

"No," said Ginny.

"Depends," said Harry, at the same moment.

Ginny turned and looked at him.

"No," Harry amended.

Lily's face crumpled with the sheer unfairness of it. "But she's horrible."

"Yes," said Ginny. "She is. And we are dealing with it. That's the grown-ups' job tonight, not yours."

Lily considered this, then looked across the room at Albus, her small face very serious. "I won't read it," she said. "Whatever it says. I promise."

Of everything that had happened over the whole long, awful day — the Alley, the quill, the silence in the front room, his own name in print — Albus had not expected that, of all things, to be the one that nearly undid him completely.

"Okay," he managed. "Thanks, Lil."

James pushed himself up off the arm of the chair. "Right. I'll make sure nobody brings the thing down to the Great Hall at breakfast. Word gets round, I'll head it off."

"No hexing," Harry said immediately.

"I wasn't going to hex anyone."

"James."

"I was going to threaten hexing," James said, with great dignity. "Which is completely different and entirely legal."

Ginny pointed a finger at the stairs. "Bed. Soon. Both of you."

James opened his mouth to argue on principle, then caught sight of Albus's face and, for once, let it go without a fight. "Yeah," he said. "Fine. Night."

Hermione ran briskly through the rest of what she'd need from Harry: the report, the booking details for the private room, witness statements from Hannah and Neville if they were willing to give them, the broken quill kept safe somewhere as evidence, Vale's confiscated wand logged properly through the right channels. It all sounded dull and procedural and weighed down with forms — and for exactly that reason, it was steadying. Albus found himself drifting closer to listen, because the boring machinery of it made the day feel smaller and more manageable. Not gone. Not mended. But smaller, cut down to a size a person could actually hold.

When the Floo finally went dark and the room emptied of green, Harry stayed crouched there by the cold hearth for a few seconds longer than he needed to, his forearms on his knees, looking at nothing.

Ginny took James and Lily up to bed. James went with just one look back over his shoulder, an unreadable one. Lily lingered at the bottom of the stairs — and then she crossed the whole room at a run and threw both arms around Albus's middle, hard and fast and fierce, squeezing once, before she let go and bolted up the stairs after her brother without a backward glance.

Albus stood there and stared after her, his arms still half-raised, not entirely sure what had just happened to him.

Ginny's mouth softened at the corners. "She's been worried about you. All afternoon. She just hasn't had anywhere to put it."

"I know."

"Good." Harry got to his feet from the hearth. "Al."

Albus braced himself for whatever was coming.

Harry looked tired now — the anger hadn't gone anywhere, Albus could still see it banked down underneath, but it was worn thin and the exhaustion was showing through. "I'm sorry," he said.

"You already said it wasn't your fault."

"I didn't say that."

Albus frowned, thrown. "You—"

Harry pushed his glasses up his nose, then seemed to think better of the gesture and dropped his hand. "Some of it is, Al. That's the thing. Some of it is my fault — it's my life, spilling over the edges and onto yours, onto all of you, and I can't stand here and pretend to you that it isn't." He stopped, and Albus could see him reaching for the next part, hunting for it, not finding the words sitting ready-made and waiting the way the practical words had been. "I can't make people forget who I am. I've tried. It doesn't work, you only make it worse. But I can make it harder for grown men to get near you. I can kick up an almighty fuss every time one of them crosses a line. And I can listen — properly listen — when you tell me it's gone too far. That part I can do."

Albus swallowed against the tightness in his throat. "And if I say it's too much all the time? Every day?"

"Then I listen all the time," Harry said. "Every day. That's the deal."

That was nearly more than Albus could stand, standing there in the lamplight. He looked away, fast, and stared hard at the dark window instead.

Ginny, reading him, rescued him from having to find a reply. "Tea," she announced, "and then bed. Today was vile."

Harry let out a short breath that might have grown up into a laugh, on a day with anything left in it. "That's one word for it."

"I've got others," Ginny said, gathering up the folded paper to take it out of sight. "None of them fit for the children."

"I'm still here," Albus pointed out.

Ginny looked at him, and the corner of her mouth lifted. "Exactly."

***

Later, after Ginny had gone up to settle Lily and to stop James talking through the wall, Albus stayed in the kitchen while Harry made tea, badly. He put the milk in the wrong mug, and then forgot the sugar in Ginny's entirely, lining the mugs up on the counter with the distracted carefulness of someone whose mind was three rooms and several hours away. Albus moved the milk and added the sugar and said nothing about either, and Harry didn't seem to notice the corrections, which felt right somehow.

Rain had started up against the windows while they weren't watching, light and steady, drawing wavering lines down the dark glass. The Prophet lay folded on the far end of the counter where Ginny had left it, headline turned face-down against the wood, as though that made a difference. Maybe it did.

"Will it be everywhere tomorrow?" Albus asked.

Harry leaned back against the counter, both hands wrapped around his own mug. "Some places. Not everywhere. Most people have better things to do with a Tuesday."

"At Hogwarts?"

A small pause. "Maybe. Probably some."

Albus nodded. He'd already known that. He'd known it since the headline. There hadn't really been any other answer.

Harry picked up his mug but didn't drink from it, just held it for the warmth. "Neville will know before term even starts," he said. "McGonagall too. I'll see to that tonight. Not because you're in any trouble — you understand that? You haven't done a single thing wrong. It's because it's the grown-ups' job to see that sort of thing coming and shut it down before it ever gets as far as you. That's the whole point of us. We stand in front of it."

Albus stared down into his tea, watching it steam. "I hate that."

"Yeah," said Harry.

And that was all. No comfort tacked on the end of it, no lesson folded in, no silver lining produced like a coin from behind the ear. Just the one word, set down beside Albus's own. Yeah. I hate it too.

Somehow, that let Albus breathe a little easier than anything else had all day.

After a while, into the quiet and the rain, Harry said, "For what it's worth — and I know it isn't worth much — most of the other first-years are going to be far too busy getting hopelessly lost and feeling stupid to spare a thought for who you are."

"That's not worth much," Albus agreed.

"No," Harry admitted, with the ghost of something. "But it's true. Both things can be true."

Albus glanced sideways at him. "Did people stare at you? Your first year?"

Something moved across Harry's face at that — not a flinch, it was older and stiller than a flinch, a thing that had been worn smooth by handling. "All the time," he said. "Constantly. The whole castle, the first week. I couldn't go down to breakfast without it."

Albus waited, not wanting to break it.

Harry looked down into his mug, turning it slowly. "I mostly just hated it," he said. "I'm not going to pretend I had some clever way through it. I didn't. I kept my head down and I waited for it to get boring for everyone, which it eventually did." He paused. "And I had Ron. That helped more than anything else in the world, having Ron. Having someone next to you who didn't care at all about any of it."

And Albus thought, then, of Rose — of Rose at the Burrow only last week, going on and on about window seats on the train and what was for breakfast and finding a quiet corner somewhere in the castle where the two of them could just be. Something in his chest, wound tight all day, came loose by a single turn.

"I've got Rose," he said.

Harry looked at him, and something in his own face eased to match it. "Good," he said. "That's good, Al. Hang on to that. Whatever else happens — you hang on to that."

The rain ticked softly and steadily at the glass. Somewhere upstairs James said something far too loudly through a wall, and Ginny's voice came back muffled through the ceiling, sharp enough to put an instant and total stop to it. There was a beat of silence. Then Lily laughed, once, bright and sudden, and went quiet again.

Albus picked up his tea and stood.

"Night, Dad."

Harry looked, for a moment, like he had something more in him that he wanted to say — and then visibly decided against spoiling what was already there. "Night," he said.

At the foot of the stairs, Albus stopped, one hand on the banister. He didn't turn around.

"Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"If another reporter ever asks me something. At school, or anywhere."

Harry's voice came back from the kitchen, level and certain. "Walk away."

"And if they follow me?"

"Make noise. Do something, get anyone's attention"

Albus nodded, once, to the dark stairwell.

And then, quieter, behind him, Harry added the last of it. "And I'll come."

Albus went up the stairs with the sound of the rain at his back and the article still down there in the kitchen, folded over once and turned face-down on the counter. It wasn't gone. Tomorrow people would read it, over their breakfasts, on the train, in the corridors. Some of them would believe it. Some of them would say his name aloud as though they had a right to it, as though it were a thing left out for anyone to pick up.

***

Something was wrong. That was what made it hard to get hold of. If his parents had been shouting, Albus would at least have known where to stand. But nobody shouted, nobody got sent up early, and there was none of the sharp under-the-breath arguing that meant something had properly broken. There was only a new carefulness laid over the house, as if everyone had agreed to move a bit more softly without deciding it out loud.

Dad had come home early from the Ministry two nights running, which never happened, and he hadn't gone easy afterward the way he usually did when he won an evening back. He kept drifting to the back door. Not always with his wand — mostly it was just a hand laid flat by the frame and a glance at the black windows, the look he got when he was counting things and not liking the total. Mum kept catching him at it. Once Albus saw her stop dead in the hall with a stack of folded laundry against her chest and watch him try the porch latch twice inside ten minutes. She didn't say anything. Dad turned, found her looking, and gave a small shrug that came out more like an apology than an answer.

At breakfast they were normal in pieces.

Mum still told James to stop eating standing up. Dad still went through the post one-handed with his tea in the other. Lily still wanted to know whether you were allowed to keep a baby dragon at Hogwarts "if it was very small and had good manners," and James still gave her the wrong answer on purpose, straight-faced, until Mum threatened to make him write to Professor McGonagall and ask in writing.

But there were gaps in it.

The fire went green at odd hours, and whenever it did Dad got up and stood close enough that whatever was said didn't carry to the table. One morning Mum took a Floo call in the sitting room and shut the door, which she never did. When she came back, her face was wrong, and Lily — being Lily — asked if somebody had died.

Mum's expression changed so fast that Albus nearly looked away.

"No. Nobody's died." She picked her tea back up. "Eat something, Lily, you've been pushing that round for ten minutes."

"You looked cross, though."

"I'm cross because there are muddy socks under the sofa, and I know exactly whose they are."

James didn't look up from his book. "Could be anyone's."

"Could be," said Mum. "Aren't."

Albus didn't believe for a second the call had been about socks, and across the table James didn't either. Their eyes met for half a moment. Then James went back to his book, and Albus understood that his brother had decided, on purpose, not to know.

That was the part that bothered him most. James always wanted to know.

By Saturday evening the house had gone warm and still with summer. A short, heavy rain had come through after dinner and left the garden dripping in the dark, and the whole place smelled of wet grass and the lavender Mum kept in pots by the porch steps. Lily went up first, insisting she wasn't tired through a yawn so wide she nearly walked into the door frame. James hung about far longer than he had any reason to, draped upside down over the arm of the sofa with a Quidditch magazine, watching Dad over the top of it every time he crossed the hall.

At half past ten Mum took the magazine out of his hands.

"Bed."

"I'm not even tired."

"You yawned twice in that last paragraph."

"That's just—" He yawned. "—reading. Reading's tiring."

He twisted round to find Dad, who was over by the back door again with a hand on the frame. "Dad. Tell her."

"Tell her what?"

"It's the holidays."

"It's the holidays," Harry agreed. "Go to bed."

"That's not—" James gave it up and hauled himself off the sofa one limb at a time. On the stairs he slowed beside Albus and said, low, under Lily's range, "Something's going on. With Mum and Dad."

Albus didn't say anything.

"You've noticed. Don't pretend you haven't."

Still nothing.

James shrugged, like it didn't matter, which was how Albus knew it did. "Whatever. Night."

"Night."

Albus should have gone up after him. Instead he stayed at the bottom of the stairs with a hand on the banister and watched Dad open the back door and step out onto the porch, leaving it half ajar behind him. A moment later Mum came out of the kitchen with two mugs and stopped when she saw him there.

For a second neither of them said anything.

Then she held one of the mugs out. "He'll say he wants to be left alone."

Albus took it. It was warm through. "Does he?"

"No." A pause. "Go on."

She nudged the door wider with her foot and went back into the kitchen before he could ask her anything else.

Outside, Dad was sitting on the porch boards with his legs stretched out and his back against the post, his glasses folded on the wood beside him. Without them he looked younger and more tired at the same time. The lantern was off. The only light was the dim yellow strip the kitchen window laid across the boards.

"Mum sent tea," Albus said, holding it out.

Harry took it. "Course she did." He glanced back at the lit window, then jerked his chin at the space beside him. "Sit down. You're letting all the warm out."

Albus sat, leaving a gap between them. The wood was cold through his pyjamas. Beyond the fence the village was nearly all dark, a window lit here and there. The cloud was breaking up overhead, and a few stars had come out.

They drank for a while without talking. Albus liked that about Dad. Mum always knew the right thing to say, which was its own kind of pressure; Dad could just sit, and let you not have anything ready.

A moth kept knocking against the kitchen glass. A floorboard creaked over their heads.

"James," Harry said, without looking up.

"How d'you know it's James?"

"Because it's always James."

The floorboard went still. Albus nearly laughed. Then the thing he'd been carrying all week climbed back into his throat, and he looked out at the garden instead.

"What if I don't fit in?"

Harry didn't answer straightaway. "Where, at school?"

"Yeah. There. Anywhere, I s'pose. But there first."

Harry looked up at the sky for a bit. "You might not," he said. "Not straight off."

Albus turned and looked at him.

"What?"

"You're meant to say I will."

"Would you believe me if I did?"

Albus didn't say anything.

"No," Harry said. "Me neither. And then the first time something went wrong you'd reckon I'd been lying to you the whole way along." He had a drink. "I'd rather you didn't think that."

Albus looked down at the garden, where the rain still beaded on the leaves. "Was it bad? For you?"

"Bits of it."

"But everyone says it's where everything got better for you."

"It was." A pause. "And it was the loudest, strangest place I'd ever been in my life, full of people who thought they knew me off the back of a name." He stopped. "Both. You know? It was both."

Albus rubbed his thumb along the side of the mug. "How did you do it? In the end."

"Badly." He almost smiled. "For a good while. I kept thinking it'd stop — the staring, all of it — if I just waited it out. It didn't, not for ages." He turned the mug round in his hands. "So I stopped waiting and got on with things. That's about all it was. I wouldn't call it advice."

He was quiet a moment, then went on, slower.

"Thing is, I didn't do any of it on my own. Even when I thought I was. There was Ron — met him on the train, first day. Sat in the same compartment and that was sort of that." A breath that was nearly a laugh. "Hermione turned up later. She was a nightmare, your aunt, to start with. Corrected my wand-work on day two."

"And you liked her?"

"God, no. Not for weeks." He shook his head. "But that's the point. None of it was just me. I tried to make it just me. I was rubbish at it."

"Why'd you try, then?"

Harry thought about that one. "Dunno, really," he said. "Seemed safer. And I think when you're that age you get it into your head that needing people is..." He searched for it. "Like it's a soft bit. Something for people to get at." He shrugged. "It isn't. But nobody could've told me that at eleven. Had to find it out the slow way."

Albus picked at the edge of a porch board. The thought of Rose helped, a little. He pictured her at the Burrow last week, out in the long grass with her hair half out of its plait, making plans as if a plan were a thing you could hold up against the whole world. A window seat on the train. Somewhere quiet to go.

"Rose reckons she's got it all sorted for me," he said. "Where to sit and that."

"Rose is sensible."

"She's bossy."

"Mm." Harry's mouth went up at one side. "Let her be. You could do a lot worse than bossy."

A few seconds passed. The last of the cloud was thinning out, and the stars came through harder behind it.

"What if I'm rubbish at everything?" Albus asked.

"You won't be."

"You don't know that."

"No," Harry admitted. "But you don't either. Not yet. That's most of what going's for — you don't find out what you're any good at till someone makes you have a go."

"James knew. He always knew what he was good at."

"James knew what he liked telling everyone he was good at." A beat. "Not always the same list."

Albus snorted before he could help it.

"What were you like?" he asked. "Before you went."

Harry took his time over it. "Alright, I think," he said. "Happy, mostly. I know people don't expect that, with everything that — with how it all started. But I was." He looked out at the garden. "I had Sirius. Marlene. Remus was always round at ours, or we were round at his. And Lilah."

"Was she like a sister?"

"She was my sister. Didn't matter how it looked written down." Something in him eased off. "Younger than me. Got away with murder. She'd call me an idiot to my face and then make off with half my pudding while I was busy arguing back."

"That's literally James."

"Don't," Harry said. "That's an insult to Lilah."

Albus smiled into the mug.

He'd grown up with photographs of her — Marlene with her head thrown back laughing, one arm slung round a much smaller version of Dad; Marlene holding a baby James with a look that said she'd already worked out he'd be trouble. Hearing about her was a different thing from seeing her, though.

"What was she like?" he asked. "Marlene."

For a second Dad didn't answer. Marlene's name did that sometimes — there'd be a small gap before he found his way back into the sentence.

"Sharp," he said eventually. "Not unkind. Just — sharp. She didn't miss anything. You couldn't get a thing past her, not even a little one."

"Like Mum."

"A bit." His mouth twitched. "Your mum's got more patience than Marlene ever had."

Albus gave him a look.

"...With most people," Harry allowed.

"What was she, though? To you."

It came out barer than he'd meant it, and Albus wished it back, but Harry didn't seem to mind.

"She brought me up," he said. "Her and Sirius. Remus round the edges. But it was Marlene did the ordinary stuff. The stuff nobody thinks to be grateful for. Made me eat before I tore off outside. Nagged me about homework. Told Sirius when he was being reckless, told me off the second I started copying him." He turned the mug. "All that."

"Do you miss her?"

"Yeah." No gap before it this time. "Course I do."

He had a mouthful of tea that must have gone stone cold. "Doesn't get smaller, that sort of thing. Everyone expects it to. It just goes quiet."

A longer quiet came down then. It wasn't an empty one. It had Dad's old grief in it, and the wet garden, and the thing — whatever it was — that Mum and Dad had been carrying round the house all week.

"What about your mum and dad?" Albus asked carefully. He added, though he didn't need to, "I mean your ones. James and Lily."

"I know who you mean."

Albus waited.

Harry set the mug down on the boards and leaned back on his hands. "I don't really remember them," he said. "Not the way people want me to. They want me to have something — being held, being sung to, I don't know. Something warm." He shook his head, slowly. "What I've got is the end. My dad's voice, telling someone to run. My mum. A lot of green." He swallowed; it was loud in the dark. "Enough that I wish I didn't have any of it. But not the other stuff. Not what they liked, or how they laughed, or — what they were like on some ordinary Tuesday." He stopped. "That's what I'd have wanted. And that's the bit there's nothing of."

Albus stared out at the garden. He'd never once thought of it like that — that his grandparents, who turned up in every book with all their bravery and their sacrifice, were mostly just fear, inside Dad's own head.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"You didn't do it."

"I know. Still."

Harry nodded, and let it be that, without making it into anything larger.

After a moment he said, "Sirius told me about him. My dad. So did Marlene. Remus was the honest one, though — the other two made him sound like he could do no wrong, and Remus would tell me when he'd been a prat." A small breath. "Liked that better, weirdly. Made him real."

Albus turned that over.

"And the Weasleys had me round half the time," Harry went on. "Whenever it all got a bit loud in here." He tapped two fingers against his own temple, then dropped his hand. "You don't always get the people you're meant to get, Al. I didn't. But the ones I got instead — they did the job. More than."

"Do you ever wish you were just normal?" Albus asked. "Like, nobody knowing who you were."

"All the time." It came out fast enough that Albus snorted. "Still do, half of it. Used to think boring sounded like heaven." He shrugged. "Then I'd get a quiet stretch and start climbing the walls inside a week. So maybe it's just me."

"That's so James."

"That's enough out of you about James."

The laugh went out of both of them slowly. Harry looked off past the fence, toward the fields and the black line of the trees beyond, and his face did the thing it had been doing all week — went somewhere Albus couldn't follow. Albus looked too, and saw nothing but dark.

He sat up a little straighter. "You're being weird," he said. "You and Mum. All week."

Harry reached for the mug. It was empty. He held it anyway. "I'm tired."

"It's not that."

"It's work stuff. Ministry stuff." His voice wasn't sharp, but there was a wall behind it. "Nothing you need to be carrying about."

"That's what people say when it's actually bad."

Harry looked at him for a moment. "Yeah," he said. "Sometimes it is." He didn't dress it up. "Leave this one with me. All right?"

Albus hated how final it sounded. He hated more that part of him was glad of it — glad to be handed back to the smaller, simpler problem of school.

"Fine."

"Al."

"What?"

Harry took a moment over it. "When I was a kid, people kept things from me. To keep me safe, they said. And it didn't — it just meant I was always half in the dark, filling the gaps in myself, usually with something worse than the truth." He rubbed his jaw. "So I'm not going to sit here and tell you nothing's going on. There is. But there's a difference between keeping you in the dark and just — not handing you something heavy at half eleven at night, when there's nothing you could do with it anyway." He looked at him. "This is the second one. You'll have to take my word for it."

The thing sat there between them, unnamed. Harry didn't touch it. Albus didn't know enough to ask properly. Somewhere above them a door opened and clicked shut — Lily, probably, off to the bathroom, or spying and making a hash of it.

Albus wrapped both hands round the mug. "What if just being me isn't enough? For people."

"Enough for which people?"

Albus didn't have an answer. That was sort of the trouble.

Harry let the quiet sit, then had a go at it. "Look — it won't be. Not for everyone. Some of them'll want you louder. Or braver, or funnier, or more like James. Some'll want you nothing like me, just so they can make a point of it." He shook his head. "You could spend the whole seven years trying to be the right shape for whoever's stood in front of you. You'd wear yourself down to nothing, and you still wouldn't pull it off."

"So what am I meant to do?"

"Find the few you don't have to do that with." He said it more quietly. "Doesn't need to be many. Two. Three. People you can just — sit next to. Like this." He tipped his head, meaning the porch, the dark, the two of them. "That's the thing worth having. The rest of them you're decent to, and you don't lie awake over."

Albus thought about it. "Rose says we'll find somewhere quiet. To go."

"She sounds like she's got the measure of it."

"She says the Houses don't matter as much as everyone makes out."

"She's right."

"Everyone acts like they're the most important thing in the world, though."

"People act like loads of things are the most important thing in the world." A small shrug. "My House gave me Ron. Gave me somewhere to sit, people at my back. That's not nothing. But it never once told me who I was. Had to sort that out myself." He glanced at him. "Don't let a hat do it for you."

Albus let that sit. He wasn't sure he believed it all the way down, but it sounded like something Dad had paid for, which made it harder to wave off.

The back door opened behind them and Mum came out, barefoot, a cardigan thrown round her shoulders. She took in Dad, then Albus, then the general temperature of the porch, all in about a second.

"Lily's gone to sleep in our doorway," she said. "On the floor. 'Resting her eyes.'"

Harry huffed. "She still doing the fake snore?"

"Gave it up about ten minutes ago. Small mercies."

Albus glanced toward the door. "Is she scared?"

"She's nosy," Ginny said, coming to stand behind them. "And a bit worried. The two tend to come together, in this family." Her hand settled on Harry's shoulder. "Bed, you. In a minute. And I mean a minute — not your dad's idea of one."

"My minutes are fine."

"Your minutes have a reputation." But she didn't take her hand away, and Albus saw Dad reach up and lay his over it, just for a second, before she stepped back inside and left the door open a crack.

Albus watched her go. "She's worried about you."

Harry was quiet a moment. "She worries," he said. "Comes with me, I'm afraid. Has done for years."

"That's not really an answer."

"No." He didn't dress that up either. "It's not."

And he left it there. Not coldly. Just a door he wasn't going to open tonight, however nicely Albus knocked.

The last of the cloud had gone, and the stars stood out hard and bright. Harry put his glasses back on and looked like himself again, or like the version of himself he kept for everyone else.

"I'm not going to fit in everywhere," Albus said. "Am I."

"No," said Harry. "You're not."

"You're really bad at making people feel better, you know that?"

"Yeah. I've been told." He bumped his shoulder against Albus's. "I'd rather give you the true one, though. The nice version never holds up. First thing that goes wrong, it falls to bits." A pause. "You'll fit somewhere. Not everywhere — nobody does. But somewhere, with the right few people. That's more than enough to be going on with."

Albus wanted that to be unsatisfying. It wasn't.

He stood up, stiff from the cold boards. Dad stayed where he was, leaning back on his hands with his head tipped up. And for a moment Albus didn't see Dad at all — he saw a man with a great stack of names behind him and something else waiting up ahead, the thing the grown-ups had quietly agreed he and James and Lily weren't going to hear about yet.

That frightened him more than the newspaper had.

"Dad?"

Harry looked over.

"Were you scared? First night."

Something moved over his face, and then a small, lopsided smile. "Terrified. Couldn't even have told you what of, exactly. Just — all of it."

Albus nodded.

"Ron had a great smudge of dirt on his nose the whole way up to the castle," Harry added. "All through the boats, right up to the doors. Nobody told him." He shook his head, almost fond. "Don't know why, but it helped. Bit hard to stay that scared, sat next to that."

That got a real smile out of him.

He went to the door and stopped with his hand on it. "Night."

"Night, Al."

Inside, the kitchen was warm and low-lit. Mum stood at the sink with her arms folded, watching Dad through the glass. She didn't turn round when Albus came in.

"He'll come in," she said, to no question.

"I know."

She glanced round at him, and some of the hardness in her face let go. "You all right?"

He nearly said yes out of habit. "Bit better than I was."

"Good." She turned back to the window. "That'll do for now."

Upstairs there was a scramble of bare feet as Lily flung herself off the landing and back toward her room. James's door stood open a crack. The house hadn't settled. It was holding still — the way you hold still when you've heard a noise once and you're waiting to find out whether it comes again.

Albus stopped at his own door and looked back down the stairs. Through the kitchen window he could still see Dad out on the porch, dark against the dark garden, his face turned up to the sky. Mum stood inside with one hand flat on the counter, watching him. Neither of them said anything. Neither of them needed to.

Whatever was coming, they'd already heard it once. They were only waiting, like the rest of the house, to hear ***

The next morning came in too carefully, and Albus knew something was wrong before he was properly awake.

He could hear it in the house. There was the ordinary noise under everything — the kettle ticking up to a boil in the kitchen, a floorboard taking somebody's weight, a cupboard door easing shut — but it was all happening too gently, the way people moved around a room where someone was ill, or sleeping. On a normal morning the house announced itself. James made a racket before he'd decided to. Lily fired questions at people who hadn't yet had any tea. Mum told at least one of them to get out from underfoot. This morning the whole place was holding its breath, and that was worse than any amount of shouting would have been.

He lay still for a minute longer than he needed to, the way you put off the first step into cold water. There was a weight sitting low in his chest that hadn't been there when he went to sleep, as though he'd swallowed something cold in the night and it hadn't gone down. He dressed slowly, listening for raised voices, and none came. Once, a low run of words reached him up through the floorboards — Dad's voice, then Mum's, then nothing again — too muffled to make out, but he didn't need the words. He knew the shape of a conversation being kept quiet on purpose.

James was already on the landing when Albus opened his door, hair flat on one side and standing up at the back, a jumper bunched in one fist. He had the look he got when he was working out whether to start something or wait for someone else to start it for him.

"You hear them?" he said.

"A bit."

"They stopped the second I opened my door." He dragged the jumper on over his head, harder than it needed. "Always a great sign, that."

A thump came from Lily's room, then a small hiss of pain, and her door opened. She'd done her own hair and made a mess of it; one side had already given up and was sliding loose over her ear.

"What's happening?"

James shrugged, and it came off badly. "Dunno. Breakfast."

"You do know."

"I don't."

"You're doing your face."

"I haven't got a face."

"Everyone's got a face," Lily said, with the unanswerable logic of the youngest, and Albus moved past the pair of them toward the stairs, because standing on the landing was making the waiting worse, not better.

He could feel James and Lily falling in behind him, walking closer than they normally bothered to. At the bottom of the stairs the kitchen door stood open. Mum was sitting at the table instead of working at the counter, which was the first thing that was wrong, and Dad was over by the sink with his sleeves shoved up and his wand lying next to his mug, which was the second. The Prophet sat folded by the toast rack, and nobody had touched it.

Neither of them looked the least bit surprised to see all three of their children arrive together.

Mum set her tea down. "Sit down, all of you."

Lily had gone white around the mouth. "Has someone died?"

"No." Harry said it straight away, before the question could properly land. He came across and pulled out a chair for her — not making a fuss of it, just clearing the space so it was obvious where she should go. "Nobody's died. I promise you."

James stayed on his feet. "Then what is it?"

"Sit down, James."

There was something in the way he said it that got James into the chair, even if he did it stiffly, all elbows and resentment. Albus took the seat nearest the window. Out beyond the glass the garden was full of clean morning light, green and ordinary, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the way the kitchen felt. Lily slid in between James and Mum and pushed both her hands under her thighs, as though she didn't trust them not to grab at something.

Dad stayed standing a moment longer. Then he seemed to decide against it and sat down across from the three of them. Mum's hand moved on the tabletop — not reaching for his, just coming to rest near enough that he could have taken it if he'd wanted to.

"I've got to go away," Harry said. "For work."

He didn't dress it up. No run-up to it, nothing soft laid down first to break the fall. The words just sat there on the table between them, and Albus looked at the grain of the wood and felt his stomach drop straight through the floor.

A thought came up out of nowhere, fully formed, before he could stop it — what if you don't come back — and he shut a door on it so hard and so fast that he felt sick, ashamed of himself for even letting it in the room.

James got there first. "Away where?"

"I can't tell you that."

"How long?"

"A few weeks. Maybe less."

"Maybe more," James said.

A muscle went in Harry's jaw. "Maybe more."

Lily looked from one of them to the other, then at Mum. "Why can't someone else go instead?"

Mum answered before Harry had to. "Because it has to be your dad. This time."

"That's not a proper answer."

"No," Ginny said. "It's the one we've got, love."

James had tipped his chair onto its back legs, and his voice was getting louder and flatter at the same time. "You haven't done one of these in years."

"No. I haven't."

"So why's it got to be you? You're Head Auror. You send people — that's the whole point of you, you sit behind a desk and you send everyone else out."

"Most of the time," Harry said. "Yeah."

"So do that. Send someone."

"Not with this one."

"Why not?"

Harry let a breath out. "Because there are about four people in the country who could go, and I'm the one who ought to. That's it, James. There's no clever reason I'm keeping back from you. Nothing I could say that'd make it sit any better. I wish there was."

The chair came down hard on all four legs. "You don't even mind, do you." James's voice had gone thick. "Not really. You'd rather be out there doing this than—" He stopped himself, hard, because even saying it he knew it wasn't true, and the rest of the sentence hung in the air anyway, jagged and unfinished and impossible to take back.

The kitchen went very quiet.

Harry didn't snap at him. He didn't even look angry. He looked, for a moment, like the words had gone in somewhere under his ribs and lodged there. "That's not it," he said, low. "And you know it isn't."

"James," Mum said.

"I know," James said, to the table. "I know." His ears had gone red.

Lily's eyes had gone glassy, but her voice came out small and hard. "Are there Death Eaters?"

"No," Harry said.

It helped, for about a second.

"Are there people like them?"

Harry took a breath. "There are dangerous people. That's why Aurors go and ordinary folk don't."

"So that's a yes."

"Close enough," Harry said, quietly.

Across the table Mum's eyes went to him, fast, and Albus saw Dad feel the look land and drop his own gaze to his hands rather than meet it.

Nobody had touched the toast. It sat going cold and leathery in the middle of the table. The kettle gave a small tick as it cooled. Out in the hedge a bird was singing its head off, bright and stupid and entirely unbothered by any of it, and Albus found that he resented it.

"When?" James said. His anger had burned down to something smaller and worse.

"Tomorrow night."

Lily made a sound as though the air had been knocked out of her. Mum had an arm round her before she'd finished making it, and Lily turned in and let herself be pulled against Mum's side without a word — which, from Lily, meant everything.

James had gone very still. "Tomorrow."

"Yes."

"You've known."

"Since yesterday."

"You and Mum knew last night, then." His eyes flicked across to Albus, just for half a second, and away. "On the porch. While you were sat out there—" He stopped himself again.

Harry's mouth opened, but whatever he meant to say didn't come.

"We weren't going to tell you at bedtime," Mum said.

"That's what people say when they've already made their minds up." His voice cracked clean down the middle on the last word, and Albus watched the colour climb up his brother's neck, furious at his own throat for giving him away.

Harry started to push his chair back, turning toward James — and into that, from against Mum's side, in a voice almost too small to hear, Lily said:

"Are you coming back?"

Nobody moved. The question hung there in the middle of the table, the one none of them had been brave enough, or stupid enough, to say out loud.

Harry went still with his hand still on the back of his chair. Then he let go of it, and came round the table, and crouched down in front of Lily so they were level, the way he had to with her now that she was getting too big to lift. He didn't answer straight away. And the fact that he didn't answer straight away was the thing that frightened Albus most of all.

"I am going to do everything I can to come home to you," Harry said. "Everything there is to do. That much I can promise you, and I mean every word of it."

Lily's chin was wobbling. "You didn't say yes."

For a moment Dad didn't say anything. He could have. It would have cost him nothing, and it would have made her stop crying, and they all knew he wouldn't, because lying to them was the one thing he had never once been willing to do, even when the truth was the crueller choice.

"No," he said. He held her eyes and didn't look away from them. "I didn't."

Lily's face crumpled, and she turned it back into Mum's cardigan. Harry stayed crouched there a second longer, one hand on her knee, and then he stood, slower than he'd sat, and looked at James.

"Come outside with me."

James eyed him, raw. "Where?"

"Garden."

"I'm not five."

"No. But your sister's crying, and you and I have things to say to each other that aren't for in here. Come on." He was already moving toward the back door.

James went, because not going would have made him feel younger than staying angry did. The door shut behind the two of them. They didn't go far — Albus could see them both through the window, James with his arms crossed hard over his chest, Dad standing a good arm's length off so it didn't look like a telling-off. Whatever they said to each other didn't reach the glass.

Lily was still crying into Mum's cardigan, trying to do it without anyone hearing, and not managing it. Ginny ran a hand over her hair, once, then just left it resting at the back of her head.

"I hate Aurors," Lily said, muffled.

"No, you don't."

"I hate missions, then."

"That one you're allowed."

"What if he gets hurt?"

Ginny looked out of the window, at Harry in the garden. "Then he comes home and moans about the food at St Mungo's for a fortnight."

Lily's head came up, blotchy and outraged. "That's not funny."

"No," Ginny said, and kissed the top of her head. "It's not." And just for a second, before she smoothed it away, Albus saw something move across his mother's face that she did not mean any of them to see.

Albus shifted, and his chair scraped on the floor. Mum's eyes came to him, but he looked away before she could ask, because he didn't have the thing she'd be looking for. He wanted to be angry like James, or to come apart like Lily — to have somewhere obvious to put it all. Instead it felt as if the whole room had quietly stepped back and left him sitting in a cold patch on his own, holding something with no name and nowhere to set it down.

Dad was good at this. Everyone knew that. Harry Potter had walked back out of things people still wrote books about; he'd been an Auror more than twenty years; he'd fought in a war before he was old enough to vote; he'd gone into places so often that grown-ups dropped their voices when they mentioned them. And none of it helped. If anything it made the fear worse, because nobody sent for someone like Dad over something small. They sent for him when it had already gone badly wrong, and they kept sending for him, and one day — the thought slid in sideways before he could stop it — one day the law of it would catch up, the way it had caught up with everyone in those books who'd been brave one time too many.

Out in the garden James scrubbed at his face with the heel of his hand and turned sharply away. Dad didn't go after him, and didn't reach for him. He just stood there and waited. After a while James said something, and Dad answered, and James kicked at the grass and then went still and listened while Dad said something more.

Mum watched them the whole time, Lily tucked under her arm, her face gone smooth and unreadable in a way Albus didn't often see on her. He wondered if it was the face she'd worn when she was young and waiting at the end of the war, looking out for people she loved to come back out of places she hadn't been allowed to follow them into. He wondered how many mornings like this one she had already lived through, before any of them had been born to see it.

The back door opened a few minutes later. James came in first, red around the eyes and plainly furious with the entire world on principle. Dad came in after him. He didn't look any calmer, exactly, but the worst of the edge had gone off him.

James dropped back into his chair without looking at anyone. "I'm not apologising."

"I didn't ask you to," Harry said, and sat down.

Lily sniffed wetly. "Did you shout?"

James scowled at the table. "No."

"Did Dad?"

"No."

"Oh." She seemed to find that almost more worrying than shouting would have been.

Mum pushed the plate of toast toward the middle of the table. "Eat. All of you. I mean it."

Nobody wanted toast. Everybody took a slice anyway, because turning it down would only have started something else. Harry answered what he could after that, and was plain about what he couldn't. He'd leave tomorrow evening. Kingsley knew. Hermione knew. The business with the press was still being sorted out and had nothing to do with him going — he was firm about that, said it twice. Neville had been told to call on him if Mum needed anything at all. Ron and Hermione would be in and out. George had been warned in no uncertain terms not to turn up with anything explosive "for morale," which meant he would almost certainly turn up with something that wasn't technically explosive and was going to be a nuisance regardless.

It was all flat, and careful, and gave nothing away. No place. No names. No promises past the ones he could actually keep — and Albus had just watched, in front of all of them, exactly how few of those there were.

"I'll write when I can," he said.

Lily was staring down at her toast. "That means not every day."

"It means when it's safe to."

"Safe for you, or safe for us?"

Harry stopped. "Both."

It was the wrong thing to say, even being the true thing, and Lily went quiet again, and stayed that way.

The morning came apart after that, in uneven pieces. James took himself off to his room and put his wireless on far too loud, until Mum called up the stairs once and it dropped to something bearable with no argument — which told Albus more about the state of his brother than anything James had said out loud. Lily attached herself to Dad and trailed him from room to room for the best part of twenty minutes, manufacturing reasons to need him: a drawer that wouldn't open, a book she couldn't reach, a serious enquiry into whether Anthony Longbottom would like a knitted dragon if she made him one and it came out a bit wrong. Dad answered every single one of them as though he had no idea at all what she was actually doing — and only Albus, watching, understood that she had simply decided to spend every minute she could get standing within arm's reach of him while he was still here to stand near.

Albus kept out of the way.

He went up to his room, and then came straight back down again, because being on his own only turned the fear up louder. The study door was standing half open. Dad was inside, talking into the Floo in a low voice — Albus caught Kingsley's name, and then somewhere he'd never heard of, and then Dad saying, "No — I want the younger team kept off the first entry," in a tone that had nothing in common with the one he'd used out on the porch the night before. It was clipped, and certain, and entirely in charge. A stranger's voice, almost. The voice of the man other people sent for.

Albus stepped back out of sight before anyone could catch him there.

In the sitting room Mum was folding washing that, as far as Albus could see, had already been folded once. She glanced up as he came in.

"You heard some of that," she said. Not a question.

"A bit."

She set the towel down on the pile. "Come here."

He didn't, not straight off. Then he crossed the room and sat down at the far end of the sofa, leaving as much space as the sofa allowed, and Mum let it be, the way Dad let things be. She picked up another towel, ran a hand down it once to smooth it, and laid it on the stack.

"He'll be angry if he knows I heard," Albus said.

"He won't be angry. He'll be annoyed with himself for leaving the door open."

"That's worse."

"A bit. Yeah."

The house settled and creaked around them. A dull thud came from upstairs — James, probably, dropping something he could perfectly well have set down. Out in the hall Lily's voice went up briefly, asking Dad where the blue ink had got to, though she had no earthly use for blue ink.

Albus looked at his hands. "Please don't tell Dad."

Mum's hands went still over the washing. "Tell him what?"

"That I'm—" He hated the word so much he very nearly couldn't get it out. "—scared. Worried. Whatever you want to call it."

"Al."

"Please." It came out too fast, and he dragged it back down quieter. "He's already got enough on. You saw him this morning. You saw him with Lily. If he finds out I'm frightened on top of all of it, he'll just—" He stopped, because he wasn't entirely sure how to finish the sentence. Carry it. That was the trouble with Dad. He picked things up and carried them whether you handed them to him or not.

Mum sat back against the cushions and let out a long, slow breath. Not impatient. Tired, in a way that made Albus feel suddenly older for having noticed it.

"Your dad's been an Auror more than twenty years," she said. "And before that there was the war, which I'd really rather not have had to count as work experience, but there it is. He knows what danger looks like. He knows how to read a room, how to get himself out of one, when to push and when to sit still and wait. And the people going with him are good at their jobs too. He won't be on his own out there."

Albus swallowed. "That doesn't mean he won't get hurt."

"No," Mum said. Her voice didn't waver. "It doesn't."

It hurt less than a comforting lie would have done, somehow. And because she hadn't lied, he found he could finally say the thing he'd shut the door on at the kitchen table — say it here, to her, where Dad couldn't hear it.

"What if—" He couldn't get the rest out.

Mum waited. When nothing came, she said it for him, quietly, because pretending the words weren't in the room had never once helped anybody. "What if he doesn't come back."

Albus couldn't even nod.

She was quiet for a moment — long enough to frighten him, because Mum was never quiet before an answer, she always had it ready. "I'm not going to promise you that he will," she said at last. "You'd know it for a lie, and then you'd never trust another word out of me. But he has. Every single time, for twenty years, he has walked back through that door." Her hand pressed flat against the folded washing, and stayed there. "I hold onto that. It's allowed to not feel like enough. You hold onto it anyway. Some mornings it's the only thing there is to hold."

The room was very still. Out in the hall the floorboards creaked under Dad's weight, alive and ordinary, and the sound of it made Albus's chest ache so hard he had to look down.

"Dad's scared?" he said. Because she'd said it earlier and he hadn't been able to make it fit.

She looked back at him, and didn't soften it. "Of course he is."

"He doesn't seem scared."

"No," she agreed. "He wouldn't." Something that wasn't quite a smile touched the corner of her mouth and was gone. "He's your dad."

"I don't want him thinking I'm being stupid about it," Albus said.

"You are not being stupid." It came out sharp enough to bring his head back up.

He nodded, embarrassed.

She eased off, but only a little; Mum never made comfort too soft to keep hold of. "Being frightened because your father's walking into something dangerous isn't childish, Al. It's just horrible. There's no clever way round horrible. And wanting to take it off his plate for him — that's a kind thing to want. A bit misguided. But kind."

"Are you going to tell him?"

She held his eyes for a moment. "Not the way you're afraid I will. I'm not going to march into that study and announce that you're frightened."

Albus let out some of the breath he'd been holding.

"But I'll say it now — I'm not spending our last day with him helping this whole family pretend at one another until we all lose our minds," she added, and the word last went through Albus like cold water, even though he knew she only meant the last one before tomorrow. "If your dad asks me whether you're all right, I'm not going to lie to him. Not even for you."

"That's not the same thing."

"No," Mum said. "It isn't."

He looked down again. "I just don't want him thinking about us when he's meant to be watching out for himself. Out there."

And there her face changed. This time she did move, closing some of the careful space between them on the sofa, though she still didn't crowd him.

"Albus," she said. "He thinks about you all the time. You, and James, and Lily, and me. That's not the thing that's going to get him hurt." She paused, to make sure it landed properly. "It's most of the reason he comes home. You're not the weight he's carrying out there. You're the rope he climbs back up."

Albus's eyes burned. He drove the heel of his hand hard against his knee and stared at the floor and did not let it spill, because if he started he didn't think he'd be able to stop before tonight.

From the hall, Dad's voice lifted a notch. "No — Robards signed off on that one before he retired, it'll be in the old file. Have another look."

Mum's mouth twitched, almost against her will. "And he'll come home to grumble about the filing, which is a good deal less stirring than the rest of it, and probably more accurate."

A breath went out of Albus that nearly made it all the way to a laugh, and then didn't.

She didn't remark on it. She reached into the basket, pulled out a single sock, and held it up between two fingers. "James's. Clean, somehow. Against all the odds."

"Mum."

"What? I've run clean out of wisdom for one morning. You get laundry now."

It could have turned into a proper joke, and she let it stop where it was, and Albus was grateful. The quiet that came after was an easier one to sit inside.

After a minute he said, "What should I do? Today, I mean."

"Today." She thought about it. "Let Lily trail him about if she needs to. Let James be cross — you don't have to be cross back every time he is. Eat your lunch, even if it's like chewing cardboard. And tonight, say whatever you've got to say to him. It honestly doesn't have to be anything clever, or big."

"What if I can't get it out?"

"Then go and stand next to him for a bit," she said. "Your dad understands that one better than almost anybody alive."

Albus let himself lean back into the cushions. He believed her, because he knew it about himself — that he was hopeless with the big feelings unless they came attached to something to do, some job to bury them in. Dad was exactly the same. Albus would sooner have been hexed than say so out loud, but he knew it.

The study door opened. Dad came out into the hall with a roll of parchment in one hand, Lily glued to his side and clutching three bottles of ink she had no possible use for. He looked into the sitting room, and his eyes went from Mum to Albus, quick, taking the temperature of the room without making anything of it.

"All right?" he said.

Albus could feel Mum not-quite-watching him, steady, waiting to see what he'd do.

He made himself say it. "Yeah."

Dad didn't believe all of it. Albus could see that he didn't. But he took what he was given and didn't pick at the rest — and Albus thought, watching him decide not to push, that maybe that was its own kind of mercy between people who were the same in this one way. "I'm doing sandwiches in a bit," Dad said.

Mum raised an eyebrow. "You are?"

Dad looked toward the kitchen, then back at her. "I'm overseeing sandwiches."

"That sounds a good deal safer for everyone."

Lily leaned harder into his side, ink bottles and all. "Can mine have extra cheese?"

"Yeah."

"Careful," Mum said, getting up and gathering the folded washing. "You start saying yes that easily, they'll have the shirt off your back by teatime."

Dad's eyes rested on her for a moment, and something went between the two of them that Albus was too young to read the whole of, and old enough to feel the weight of anyway.

Then he looked at Albus. "Al."

Albus's chest pulled tight. "What?"

"Cheese?"

It was such an ordinary question. Far too ordinary for the morning they'd had. And somehow that was the precise thing that made it possible to answer.

"Yeah," Albus said. "Extra."

Dad nodded, once, like it mattered. "Good."

He headed off toward the kitchen with Lily still fixed to his side and the ink bottles knocking together in her arms. Mum watched the two of them go, then looked back at Albus.

"One thing at a time," she said.

He nodded.

The rest of the day went by in small, lopsided pieces. James came down for lunch and made a point of sitting directly across from Dad — still angry, still not saying much, but there, which was its own kind of statement. Lily ate half a sandwich and then climbed into Dad's lap and claimed she only wanted a better look at the plate. Dad let her stay, and didn't tell her she was too big for it, which she was. Mum kept the house moving, because somebody had to, but every time Dad went out of a room her attention went with him, like a thread paying out behind him.

Albus watched all of it and said next to nothing. And once, in the middle of the afternoon, he caught himself doing something that frightened him more than anything else all day: studying the back of Dad's neck where his hair needed cutting, the particular way he pushed his glasses up with one knuckle, the sound of his voice in the next room — storing them, the way you store up things about a person you are afraid you might have to remember them by. He stopped the moment he noticed, his face going hot with a shame he couldn't have explained to anyone, because to do it at all was to have already let himself believe, somewhere underneath, that Dad might not be coming back.

He was still frightened. Nothing Mum had told him had taken that away, and he didn't think she'd expected it to. Dad could be brilliant, and experienced, and careful, and brave, and still not come back through the door when he was meant to. Albus had read enough history to know that loving someone had never once been enough, on its own, to keep them. His grandparents had loved Dad. Marlene had loved him. None of them were here.

But then Dad stood at the kitchen counter, late in the afternoon, making a hash of wrapping a sandwich for Lily to take out to the garden, and when the paper tore straight down the middle he swore under his breath and glared at it — so genuinely, so ordinarily annoyed by such a small, stupid failure — that something in Albus's chest steadied underneath the fear, without quite shifting it. People who were about to be taken from you did not stand swearing at greaseproof paper. That was the thought he held onto. He knew it didn't prove anything. He held onto it anyway.

The light was already starting to go long and gold across the kitchen floor, the day spending itself far too fast, carrying them toward a tomorrow none of them wanted to arrive. Dad was going away. Dad would do everything he could to come back.

***

The house was wrong without Dad in it, and it took Albus a few days to work out exactly how.

It wasn't the quiet. The house had never been properly quiet — not with James in it, not with Lily — and it wasn't really quiet now. The wrongness was subtler than that, a set of small absences that added up to one large one. Dad's mug stayed in the cupboard. His chair at the kitchen table sat pushed in and untouched, and everyone went on leaving the space around it clear without anybody deciding to. On the first night, and the second, and the third, no one went round the back door last thing to try the latch and lay a hand flat against the frame the way Dad always had, and Albus lay awake upstairs feeling, absurdly, that the house had been left unguarded — as though that small nightly ritual had been the thing keeping the dark out, and now nobody was doing it.

He didn't say any of that to anyone. There wasn't a way to say it that didn't sound mad, and besides, everyone in the house was busy not saying their own version of it.

Mum filled the empty space with work, the way she'd told him she would, that afternoon on the sofa before Dad left. Albus had thought, at the time, that she'd meant it lightly. She hadn't.

She covered the Quidditch for the Prophet — had done for years, league matches and the internationals and the long grumbling sagas of which club had poached whose Seeker — and Albus had always known it as the thing that took her out on a Saturday and brought her back full of opinions. Now it took her out most days. The kitchen table stopped being a table and became something more like the back room of a newspaper: galley proofs in long curling strips, match notes in her fast slanting hand, a half-drunk mug of tea going cold at her elbow at all hours because she kept making it and then forgetting it the moment it was poured. She wrote at night, after Lily was in bed, the scratch of her quill carrying on and on through the floorboards — her own ordinary quill, never one of the self-writing kind. She had a particular loathing for those, and always had, and after the summer they'd been having Albus thought he understood it better than he used to.

She'd come in from a match keyed up and brisk, smelling of cold air and other people's pipe smoke, and she'd have all three of them fed and sorted and moving before any of them could get a word in sideways about how she was. If you asked Mum how she was, she told you about the match.

One night, late, Albus came down because his room had got too loud with thinking, and found her still at the table under the single lamp, a galley proof spread in front of her and her quill not moving.

She didn't look up. "Can't sleep?"

"No."

"Sit down, you're hovering." She pushed a chair out with her foot. "You're as bad as your dad for it."

He sat. The parchment in front of her had the same sentence on it three times, each one crossed out harder than the last. He didn't say anything about that.

She wrote a word, looked at it, scratched it out again. "Harpies lost," she said, to no one in particular. "To the Cannons, of all teams. Your uncle Ron'll have written to gloat about it before breakfast, you watch."

"Are you nearly finished?"

"No." She pressed the heel of her hand against one eye. "I keep starting the same sentence. It keeps coming out wrong."

He didn't know what to say to that, so he didn't try.

After a while she dipped the quill again. "Go on up. I won't be long." Then, lower, half to the parchment in front of her: "And if I sit here not doing it, I'll only get to thinking, so—" She let the end of it go, and didn't chase it, and started to write. "Make yourself something hot first. Take it up with you."

He boiled the kettle and didn't push her, because pushing was no use, and he knew which thoughts she meant anyway — they were the same ones keeping him out of his own bed. The quill was moving properly by the time he left, and he took that as the nearest thing to goodnight she had spare.

Lily was not doing well, and unlike Mum she had no skill at hiding it and no interest in learning.

She'd gone the opposite way from her usual self. Ordinarily Lily filled a room; that week she went quiet in corners, and slept badly, and left the light burning under her door all night, every night, as though the dark she didn't mind in June had turned, in his absence, into something she did. She had taken up the dragon again, too — the knitted one she'd threatened, weeks back, to make for the Longbottoms' baby. Dad had told her, that last morning, that it would be brilliant. So now it had to be. She worked at it with a grim, jaw-set fury that had nothing to do with knitting, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the cold hearth while the wool got steadily more knotted, and twice Albus watched her unpick a whole evening's work because a single row had gone wrong, and a wrong row would not do.

On the third evening, it beat her. She got to the end of a row, found a hole in it she couldn't account for, and something in her simply gave way. She didn't cry the way Lily usually cried — loud and furious and over inside a minute. She went quiet, and her face folded up, and she sat there with the ruined dragon in her lap making no sound at all, which was so much worse that Albus was up off the sofa and across the room before he'd thought about it.

He sat down on the floor next to her. He wasn't Mum, who'd have known the right thing to say, and he wasn't Dad, who'd simply have been there until it passed. He was only Albus, and he didn't have anything ready, so he picked up the loose end of the wool and said the first true thing in his head.

"It doesn't have to be finished before he's back."

Lily's head came up. Her eyes were swimming. "He said it'd be brilliant."

"It will be."

"It's got a hole in it."

"He's a baby, Lil. He can't even hold his own head up yet." Albus turned the lumpen thing over in his hands. "He's not going to know it's wrong. He won't even know it's meant to be a dragon."

That dragged a wet, hiccuping not-quite-laugh out of her. And then her face crumpled all over again. "What if he's not back to see it?"

There it was — the thing none of them said in daylight, said plainly by the youngest, because she hadn't yet learned not to. Albus's chest went tight. He thought of all the careful, honest, useless things the grown-ups said, the ones that never promised what you wanted them to promise, and he found he couldn't make himself do any of them.

"Then we'll send it to him," he said. "Wherever he is. Mum'll know how." He didn't know if that was true. It was the kindest thing he had that wasn't a lie, and Lily took it the way you take the only thing on offer, and leaned into his shoulder, and let him pick up the dropped stitches one at a time while her breathing went slowly back to normal.

George came by on the fifth day, which Albus suspected was not an accident, because George rarely did anything by accident, even when he made it look that way. He had been told, apparently and in no uncertain terms, not to bring anything explosive. So he brought a box of something called Weasley's Wandless Wonders — "Entirely safe! Ministry-approved! Mostly!" — which turned out to be a set of small enchanted paper birds that flew looping circuits round the sitting room and sang, badly, in a range of borrowed voices, until you caught one and it went still and warm in your cupped hands like something with a pulse.

Lily laughed. It came out of her by surprise, the first proper laugh in days, and Albus saw George clock it and saw him decide to make absolutely nothing of it, which was the kindest thing he could have done. James announced that paper birds were beneath him, and then spent the next ten minutes trying to get two of them to sing in harmony.

George stayed for a tea he barely touched, loud and easy the whole time, filling the kitchen up the way it was supposed to be filled. But on his way out he caught Albus on his own for a second in the hall, and the loudness dropped off him like a coat.

"Your dad knows what he's doing," he said. "Better than anyone I've ever met. And he's careful with it — whatever it looks like from the stories, he doesn't take a chance he hasn't got to. He'll watch himself."

Albus nodded, because he didn't trust his voice.

"It's the waiting that's the hard part," George went on, quieter. "Not the rest of it. Just the waiting." He didn't say how he knew, and he didn't have to. "I've done my share. You hang on, all right?" He cuffed Albus lightly round the side of the head, the way he always did, and then he was gone in a bang of green flame before anyone could turn it into a moment, because George never had been able to stand a moment.

The letter came on the sixth day, and it very nearly stopped Albus's heart before he understood that it wasn't bad news.

The owl came in low over the garden in the early evening and dropped onto the kitchen sill, and for one terrible second the whole house went still around it, because nobody had said aloud what an owl might mean and everybody had thought it. Then Mum took the letter off its leg, and her face did something quick and complicated, and she said, "It's his hand," and the room let out a breath all at once.

It was short. Of course it was short. It was so completely like Dad that reading it was almost like hearing him in the room, plain and dry and giving nothing whatsoever away:

Still in one piece. Can't tell you where, and you'd be bored stiff by the bits I'm allowed to. Eat properly, all of you, and don't run your mother into the ground — she's worth ten of the rest of us and she'll never say so herself. Lily: the dragon will be brilliant, holes and all. James: you are in charge of nothing, so don't. Al: you'll be fine. Back when I'm back. — Dad

Lily made Mum read it out twice, and then took it to hold herself, smoothing the creases flat with her thumb as though she could press more words into it. "It's not very long," she said, almost accusing.

"No," said Mum. "He'll have scribbled it on his knee somewhere, between two other things. You're lucky to have it at all."

James read it over Albus's shoulder and snorted at his line. "'In charge of nothing.' Cheers. Thanks a lot." He rolled his eyes and went off as though it hadn't touched him in the slightest — and an hour later Albus passed the sitting room and saw him standing at the window with the letter held close, reading it again, his lips moving very slightly over the words, until he heard Albus in the doorway and dropped it back onto the side table like it had stung him.

Albus didn't say anything. He'd got very good, that week, at not saying anything.

Mum read it more times than any of them, he thought, though she did it where she imagined no one could see. Over the next two days he came across the letter in three different places — her coat pocket, the windowsill above the sink, folded in among the galley proofs on the table — never thrown away, never far from her hand.

It was two nights after the letter came that Albus found out about James.

He hadn't managed to sleep again; he'd more or less given up expecting to, by then. He came down for water, or for the company of a lit room, or for no reason he could have put a name to. The kitchen was dark. The only light in it was the thin grey spill of the moon through the window over the sink. And James was standing at the back door, in his pyjamas, one hand laid flat against the frame and his head bent, perfectly still, listening to the latch the way you'd listen for a heartbeat.

For a second Albus didn't understand what he was looking at. Then he understood it all at once, and it went through him cold — because it was Dad. It was exactly Dad: the hand on the frame, the tilt of the head, the small nightly checking of the dark. James was doing the thing Dad did. James, who had spent his entire life insisting he was nothing like anyone, least of all his father.

"Couldn't sleep?" Albus said, low, so as not to startle him.

James didn't jump. He took his hand off the frame, too casually, and didn't turn round. "Just getting water."

"Me too."

"There's no glass by my bed, that's all." James still hadn't looked at him. His voice had the flat, careful sound it took on when he was holding something down hard. "What."

"Nothing." Albus came a little further into the kitchen, and looked at the door, and then at his brother, and made a decision that felt enormous and was probably nothing at all. He didn't say it. He didn't say that's what Dad does. He understood, without quite having the words for why, that to say it out loud would be to take it away from James — and that James needed it far more than he needed to be caught at it.

So instead he asked, "Is it locked?"

Something in James's shoulders eased, just slightly. "Yeah," he said. "It's locked. I checked." A pause. "Someone's got to."

And there it was — as near as James would ever come to saying any of it. Someone's got to. The someone who checked the door at night was a week and more gone now, to a place with no name on it, and James — who would have walked into the lake before he'd have admitted to missing him — had quietly taken up his post.

Albus crossed the kitchen and came to stand beside him at the door. Neither of them said anything for a while. Outside, the garden lay silver and motionless under the moon, the fence a low black line, the fields beyond it asleep. Somewhere a long way off a fox barked once and went silent.

"He does it twice, you know," Albus said at last. He didn't make a thing of it. He was only handing James something. "Dad. He does the latch, and then he does it again on his way up to bed. Every night."

James was quiet. Then, gruff: "I know."

Of course he knew. He'd watched their father do it his whole life, the same way Albus had — the way you watch the small habits of the people you can't picture the world without.

James reached out and tried the latch a second time. It held. "There," he said. "Done properly now." And his voice cracked, only just, on properly — and he turned away fast and put his back to Albus so it wouldn't show, and Albus let him, because letting him was the kindest thing he had.

"Night," James said, to the dark.

"Night."

Albus went back up to bed. The house was no less empty than it had been an hour before; one boy trying a latch in the dark didn't fill the space Dad had left, and nothing did. But it felt, for the first time in days, very slightly less unguarded, and he was surprised by how much that helped, even knowing perfectly well that it shouldn't have.

He lay in the dark and listened to the house. Down the landing, James's door clicked softly shut. Across the hall, Lily was asleep at last, the light still burning gold under her door the way it had every night that week. Below them all, on the kitchen table, sat the half-written copy his mother would sit up over because the alternative was sitting up over nothing. Every single person in the house was holding the dark out the only way they each knew how.

Dad was somewhere none of them could follow, doing something none of them were allowed to know, and the only thing any of them could do about any of it was wait, and eat properly, and check the latch, and finish the dragon, and get up the next morning and do the whole of it again. It wasn't enough. Albus had learned that much already, this summer — that loving someone, and waiting for him, and keeping his house exactly as he'd left it, was no guarantee of anything in the world.

***

The Patronus came on an ordinary Tuesday evening, and afterward Albus thought that was the cruellest part of it — that there had been no warning, no worse-than-usual feeling in the air, nothing at all to tell him the waiting was about to end.

Mum was at the kitchen table with her copy, the lamp pulled in close, the scratch of her quill the only steady sound in the house. Lily was on the sitting-room floor with the dragon in her lap, not really working at it, just holding it. James was slung sideways in the armchair pretending to read a Quidditch annual he'd already read four times. Albus was on the stairs, halfway up and halfway down, because halfway was where he'd been living all week — not quite anywhere, never quite able to settle.

So he was the one who saw it come. A light moved across the dark window over the sink, silver and cold, exactly the wrong colour for the warm yellow lamp — and then it came through the glass, through the wall, the way a Patronus does, and gathered itself in the middle of the kitchen into a silver hare, sitting up on its hind legs with its ears laid back and its whole body made of light.

Mum's quill stopped.

For one held second nobody breathed. Albus knew what it was. They all did. A Patronus didn't come to a house like theirs in the evening to say something small.

Then the hare opened its mouth, and Lilah's voice came out of it — fast, and pitched tight, and trying so hard to stay level that the strain came through under every word.

"Gin. It's me. He's alive — listen to me, he's alive, he's here, he's awake and he's talking. Hold onto that, before anything else." A short breath, and the voice steadied itself by main force. "He's at St Mungo's. There was an ambush — I haven't got the whole of it yet — he's broken his arm and there's a few other things they're seeing to, but he's lucid, Gin, he knew me, he was asking after you and the children before he'd let anyone so much as look at him." Then the voice did crack, just once, and pulled itself back together. "Gin — one of his was killed. One of the young ones. I'm so sorry to tell you like this. The rest I'll tell you when you're here. Come now — fourth floor, ask for me, I'll be watching the lifts. He's going to be all right. I've got him. Just come."

The hare held a heartbeat longer, looking at nothing with its bright blank eyes. Then it came apart into light and was gone, and the kitchen it left behind was quieter than any room Albus had ever stood in.

It was Lily who broke it. She made a thin, frightened sound, the dragon sliding off her lap onto the floor, and then she was up and across the room — "Mum — Mum, is he — Mum—" — and couldn't finish a single one of them.

And Mum was already moving. That was the thing Albus would remember after: that she didn't sit, didn't put her face in her hands, didn't take the second everyone else needed in order to fall apart. She was on her feet with her wand in her hand before the silver had fully faded, sweeping the copy off the table into a drawer, and her voice when it came was flat and fast and steady — and only Albus, who had spent a summer learning to listen for it, heard how hard she was working to keep it that way.

"Shoes," she said. "All of you. Coats. We're going now."

"Is he going to die?" Lily's voice climbed and broke on the word.

"No." Mum crouched down in front of her and took her by both arms and made her look. "No. You heard your aunt Lilah. He's awake, and he's cross enough to be asking questions, and that is the best news there is. But we're not going to stand here talking about it — we're going to go and see him. So I need shoes on. Can you do that for me?"

Lily nodded, hiccuping, and ran for the stairs.

James hadn't moved. He was still in the chair, the annual fallen shut on his knee, and his face had gone the exact colour of the parchment Mum wrote on. All the sullenness of the last week, all the not-caring he'd worn like a coat, was simply gone, and underneath it he looked about nine years old.

"James." Mum's voice gentled, half a degree. "Shoes."

"He got ambushed." It came out of him cracked and accusing, though there was no one in the room to accuse. "She said ambushed. That means they were waiting for him. That means they knew he was coming, that means—"

"James." She didn't let him reach the end of it, because the end of it wouldn't help and there wasn't time. "Look at me. He's alive. We're going to him right now. Move."

And James moved, because moving was better than the alternative — the same way it had been at the back door in the dark, every night that week. And Albus understood, watching his brother shove out of the chair, that James had been right to check that latch over and over, and that none of it had made the slightest difference in the end. Nothing they did in this house had reached far enough to keep Dad safe. It never could have.

He put his own shoes on with hands that didn't quite feel like his. And underneath the fear — beneath all of it, in some cold flat place near the bottom of him — a small voice said the thing he didn't want it to say.

I knew. I told her. I was right.

He'd carried it the whole summer, the worry he wasn't allowed to hand to anyone. Mum had called it rotten but not stupid. He'd shoved it down at the kitchen table the morning Dad told them, and let it out exactly once, on the sofa, in a voice so quiet his father couldn't possibly have heard. And somewhere underneath being afraid, he had let himself hope — the way you do — that it would all turn out to be the childish thing the grown-ups had so nearly promised it wasn't. That Dad would come home in a few weeks and the fear would have been for nothing.

It hadn't been for nothing. There was a silver hare's voice still ringing in the kitchen, and his mother's white face, and a young man Albus had never met who was not going home to anyone tonight, and somewhere in all of it the unfinished sentence James hadn't been allowed to say.

He had been right to be afraid. And there was no comfort in it anywhere — none at all. Being right felt exactly like being hit.

One of the young ones, Lilah had said. Albus didn't know his name. He thought about that — that there was a name, that somewhere tonight someone else's mother was getting a different kind of message, the kind that didn't end with he's going to be all right — and that it could, just as easily, have been them. The thought was too big to pick up, so he put it down where he'd put the other one, and went to find his coat.

They Flooed from the kitchen grate one after another, into the green roar — Lily first, with Mum's hand firm on her shoulder, then James, then Albus. He stumbled out into a wide bright reception that smelled of antiseptic and something sweeter underneath it that he liked even less, and for a moment the noise and the strangers and the signs he couldn't read fast enough all threatened to come apart on him at once.

Then Mum's hand closed round his wrist — and Lily's, and a fistful of James's sleeve, the three of them gathered up in the same breath — and she steered them through all of it without slowing, past the welcome desk, into a lift that clanked shut and rose. The four of them stood pressed close in the small bright box and said nothing, because there was nothing left to say that wasn't just please, over and over, to no one in particular.

The lift opened on the fourth floor, and Lilah was there.

Albus didn't see her often — she lived her own busy life a long way from theirs — but he knew her at once, the way you know your own family across a crowded place: she had Sirius's dark colouring and Marlene's quick way of holding herself, and tonight she was in pale Healer's robes with her hair scraped back and her face drawn tight from the long bad hours of it. The moment she caught sight of Mum, something in her cracked and steadied in the same instant, the way it had in the Patronus.

"Gin." She came straight to her and took both her hands. "He's fine. He's awake. The arm's the worst of it and they've already set it — there's a few other bits, but nothing that won't mend." Her eyes went over the three of them, and softened, and grieved, all at the same time. "He's been asking for the lot of you without stopping. Driving the poor Healers spare."

Mum's careful control wavered, at last, for half a second — and then she hauled it back. "And the—" She stopped, with the children right there.

"Later," Lilah said, low. "Not now. Go on in" She turned and laid her hand flat against a door, and then looked back at the three of them, and Albus watched her decide to give them the truth instead of the kind lie — because she was Lilah, and she didn't do the soft version any more than Dad did. "He looks worse than he is. The arm, and he's knocked about, and he's — it's been a hard night, your dad. So don't let his face frighten you. He's still him underneath it. Go on, then."

She opened the door.

The room beyond was small and white and too brightly lit, and Dad was in the bed by the window with his arm strapped up across his chest and a dressing over one eyebrow and dark bruising coming up along the side of his jaw — and for one terrible second he looked smaller than Albus had ever seen him, smaller than Harry Potter was supposed to be able to look, propped against the pillows in a hospital gown with all the usual movement gone out of his body.

Then he turned his head, and saw the three of them in the doorway, and his face did something that Albus felt in his own chest like a hand closing slowly shut. There was relief in it, and there was love, and underneath both of those, far back in his eyes, there was something Albus had never seen on his father before and understood at once without anyone having to tell him. The broken arm would mend. The bruises would fade and be gone in a fortnight. But somewhere on the inside of him Dad was carrying a thing that no Healer on the fourth floor could set, or splint, or send home to heal in a few weeks — and Albus knew, looking at him across that bright little room, that the worst wound in it was not one of the ones you could see.

"Hello, you lot," Dad said. His voice was rough, and quiet, and entirely his own. "Sorry about all the fuss."

And then Lily was already across the room, and James half a step behind her, and Albus found his own feet carrying him after them — and for the first time in three weeks the whole family was in one room together at last, even if it was the wrong room, even if it had taken the worst night of the summer to put them there.

***

Up close, he looked worse.

That was the first thing Albus understood as the three of them crossed the little room to the bed — that the doorway had been kind to Dad, and the nearer you got, the more of the night showed on him. He was grey under the bruising, with shadows beneath his eyes that hadn't been there three weeks ago, and when his face wasn't doing anything in particular it settled into something heavy and shut and far away, an expression Albus had no name for and didn't like at all. Sullen wasn't quite the word. It was the look of a man who'd set something down for a minute only because he had to, and knew he'd be picking it straight back up the moment they were gone.

But then Lily reached the bed, and it lifted.

It was the strangest thing to watch. The grey didn't go and the shadows didn't go, but something came up underneath all of it, the way a lamp comes up behind a drawn curtain, and for a second Dad looked like Dad again — properly, all the way through.

"There you are," he said. His voice was rough, but it was warm. "Come here, then — careful, mind, this arm's no use to anyone at the minute."

Lily climbed up onto the edge of the bed with enormous care, as though it were made of eggshell, and pressed in against his good side, and Dad got his unstrapped arm round her and held on.

"Does it hurt?" she asked, into his shoulder.

"A bit. Less than it did. They've given me something for it that's made the whole room go a funny shape, so if I start saying daft things, that's the reason."

"You always say daft things."

It came out gruff, half-strangled, from where James had stopped at the foot of the bed — and Albus saw that his brother hadn't come any closer, and understood exactly why. James was holding himself very straight and very still, the way you do when you're not sure your own face will behave, and getting near enough to be hugged would have finished him off entirely.

Dad looked at him, and didn't make him come closer, and didn't make anything at all of the distance. "There he is," he said. "All right, James?"

"'M fine." James's jaw worked. "You're the one in the bed."

"Fair point."

Albus came up on the other side, by the strapped arm, where there was room. He didn't know what to say; he never did. Dad reached over with the hand that worked and laid it for a moment on the back of Albus's neck — warm, and solid, and there — and didn't ask him a single thing, which was exactly right, because Albus had no more answers in him than James did.

"You came," Dad said. To all of them, but his eyes rested on Albus for a second.

"'Course we came," Lily said, indignant, as though he'd suggested they might not have.

"'Course you did." A breath that was nearly a laugh, and then he winced as it pulled at something in his side. "Ow. Right. No laughing — that's the one thing I can't do, apparently. Lily, that's your job from now on. You tell everyone. No making your father laugh."

"I'm nearly finished the dragon," Lily told him, which was not an answer to anything, but seemed to be the most important thing she had. "It's got a hole, but Albus says Anthony won't mind."

"'Course he won't." Dad's hand moved against her hair. "Told you it'd be brilliant, didn't I."

Mum came round to the strapped side and sat herself down in the hard chair by the bed, and took his bad hand — gently, just the fingers, below where the sling held it. For a moment neither of them said anything at all. They didn't need to. Albus had watched them do it his whole life, that wordless thing, the talking that went on without any words in it. But tonight there was something underneath it he didn't recognise — something grave and quiet that passed between them over the tops of the children's heads, and wasn't for him. Mum's face had gone carefully smooth. Dad's eyes went to her, and then away, and the heavy faraway look came back over him for a second — there it is, Albus thought, that's the thing he put down — before he caught it, and pushed it back under, and turned to his children again.

"You lot are all meant to be in bed," he said. "Do you know what time it is?"

"It's a hospital," James said. "Nobody sleeps in a hospital."

"They'd very much like you to. It's more or less the entire point of the place."

The door opened, and Lilah came back in, and there was another Healer with her — an older man in lime-green robes and half-moon glasses, with the brisk, unbothered air of someone who'd spent thirty years watching brave people make a tremendous fuss in his beds.

"This is Healer Pye," Lilah said, by way of introduction, and then, pointedly, to Harry, "Who is looking after you. Not me. Before you start."

"I wasn't going to start."

"You were absolutely going to start." She folded her arms. "I'm not allowed within ten feet of your chart, you daft article — you're my brother. Conflict of interest, and quite right too. So whatever you're about to try and talk me into, don't. Ask him." She tipped her head at Pye.

Pye had gone to the end of the bed and picked up a chart that was filling itself in as he looked at it. "The good news first," he said, "since there's people here who'll be wanting it." He glanced round at the children, not unkindly. "The arm's a clean break. It'll knit up well — six weeks or thereabouts, and no heavy magic with it before then, which means no work you'd actually call work."

"Six weeks," Dad said, in the voice of a man handed a sentence.

"Six weeks." Pye was entirely unmoved. "The arm isn't what worries me, though. You took a fair knock to the head tonight."

Mum went very still.

"It's mild," Pye said, before anyone could speak. "A mild concussion. But mild is still a concussion, Mr Potter, and I'll thank you not to hear the word mild and decide it means nothing, the way your sort invariably do. What it means is rest. Proper rest. No work, no duelling, no late nights, no haring off after anything whatsoever, for a fortnight at the very least, and we'll see how you are after that. Quiet. Dark rooms when your head aches. And somebody keeping an eye on you, which—" he looked at Mum over the top of his glasses "—I gather will not be a problem."

"It won't," Mum said.

"It's a bump on the head," Dad said. "I've had worse falling off a—"

"Yes, I'm quite sure you have," said Pye, in the flat tone of a man who had heard every possible version of that sentence several thousand times. "And one of these days one of them will turn out to be the one that mattered. I'd rather it wasn't this one." He made a note that scratched itself onto the chart, tucked it back into its slot, and nodded round at the lot of them. "A fortnight. At least. I'll leave you to your family." And he went, the door swinging shut behind him.

When he'd gone, Lilah let out a long breath, and something in her shoulders came down, and she stopped being a Healer in a ward and went back to being Dad's sister. She came round the bed and looked down at him, and whatever was in her face then was a good deal harder to look at than anything on Pye's chart had been.

"You scared the life out of me," she said quietly.

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be careful." She bent and put her arms round him, light, mindful of the arm, her cheek resting against the top of his head. "Take it easy. I mean it, Harry. Do as you're told, for once in your life. And don't do anything stupid."

"When have I ever—"

"Don't." But she was nearly smiling when she straightened up, and she gave his good shoulder a squeeze before she let go of him.

Then she turned to the rest of them, and the smile steadied. She hugged Lily, who clung; and James, who endured it with the put-upon dignity of a boy being fussed over in public and was plainly, secretly glad of it; and Albus, quick and warm, smelling of the clean sharp smell of the ward. And last she put her arms round Mum and held on a beat longer than any of the others, the two of them not saying a word.

"Right," she said, stepping back and scrubbing once at her eyes with the heel of her wrist. "That is enough of all this. You're coming to me for dinner — properly, soon, and none of this seeing-each-other-once-a-year business. I'll cook the whole thing. You just have to turn up and say yes."

"Yes," said Lily, at once.

"Good girl. At least one of you's got sense." She let her hand rest on Lily's head for a moment, looked round at them all once more, and went, and the room felt quieter and smaller after her.

The lateness of it was catching up with all of them now. Lily had gone heavy and warm against Dad's side, more than half asleep. James, without ever seeming to decide to, had finally drifted close enough to lean against the foot of the bed. Mum still had Dad's fingers held loosely in hers.

Dad looked round at the three of them — at Lily dozing, at James pretending he wasn't about to, at Albus standing quiet by the strapped-up arm — and Albus watched him gather something up out of himself, watched him fold the worn faraway look away one more time, on purpose, for them.

"Listen," Dad said. "All of you. I'm all right. I know it doesn't look much like it, and I know tonight was—" He stopped, and didn't say what tonight was. "But I'm all right. A duff arm and a thick head, and that's the whole of it, and they both mend. I'm going to be fine."

He said it plainly, and he meant every word, and Albus believed the words.

It was only that he could see — the way he always could — the thing the words didn't quite cover. The heavy shut thing behind Dad's eyes, the one no chart had a line for, the one he'd be picking up again the moment the lights went out and the room went still and there was nothing left to hold it off. The arm would mend. The head would mend. Albus wasn't at all sure the other thing would, or how long it took, or whether you ever really put a thing like that down again once you'd had to pick it up.

But Dad was alive. He was here, in the bed, warm under Lily's cheek, complaining about the food before he'd so much as seen it, telling them he'd be fine in that flat plain voice that didn't lie to them even when a lie would have been the kinder thing.

For tonight, Albus decided, that could be enough. It would have to be. It was so much more than the silver hare had given him to hope for, three hours and a whole lifetime ago, that he wasn't going to stand there and ask it to be anything more.