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It had been a bad fortnight at the office, the sort that followed Harry home and sat at the foot of the bed while he slept, so that he woke already tired. There had been a case in Cornwall that had not gone the way anyone wanted, and a great deal of paperwork afterwards, which was somehow worse, and three nights running he had come in long after the children were asleep and stood in the dark of their rooms for a moment each before going to bed himself. He told himself this was how it had to be sometimes. He did not always believe it.
So when James came and stood in the kitchen doorway on Saturday morning — not asking yet, just standing there in his pyjamas with his hair sticking up exactly like Harry's own, working up to something — Harry put down his tea and gave him his whole attention.
"What is it?"
James scuffed one bare foot against the other. He was eight, and getting to the age where he tried to be casual about things he badly wanted, which only ever made it more obvious.
"Teddy went roller skating," he said. "With his mates. In a place with lights and music and everything, and you wear special boots with wheels, and you go round and round really fast, and Teddy said it was completely brilliant." He paused for breath. "And I thought. I just thought." He stopped, because he had reached the part he didn't quite know how to say. "It could be just us. You and me. If you wanted."
Behind James, at the stove, Ginny did not turn round. But Harry saw the back of her neck go still, the way it did when she was listening very hard and pretending not to, and he understood that this was not really a question about roller skating at all.
He had promised James a flying afternoon three weekends ago. It had not happened. Something at work, and then something else. He remembered the way James had said that's all right, Dad, far too quickly, and how the readiness of it had bothered him for days without his quite working out why.
"Right," said Harry. "Get dressed. We'll go this morning, before it gets busy."
James's whole face changed. It was like watching a light come on in a window.
"Really? Today? Now?"
"Now," said Harry. "Go on, before I come to my senses."
James was gone before the words were finished, thundering up the stairs two at a time, shouting something to Albus on the landing that was clearly designed to make Albus jealous. Harry heard Albus shout something back, and Lily start up about wanting to come too, and the ordinary morning chaos of the house close over the moment.
Ginny turned round then. She was trying not to smile and not managing it.
"Skating, eh," she said. "Right answer there."
"It was an easy one," said Harry. "For once."
She came over and kissed him, briefly, the way you do in a busy kitchen with children shouting overhead. "He's been asking me about it all week," she said quietly. "He didn't want to ask you in case you couldn't. So he asked me whether you could." She let that sit a second, not unkindly. "Go and let him win at something he hasn't even done yet. He'll be insufferable about it for a fortnight and it'll be worth every minute."
***
The rink was on a Muggle high street in a town some way from home, in a low brick building that had probably been something else once — a bingo hall, perhaps, or a swimming pool. From the outside it gave very little away. But the moment Harry pushed open the doors, the noise came out to meet them: music with a great deal of synthesiser in it and a thumping beat, a song Harry didn't know and James plainly didn't either, though that didn't stop James from immediately starting to nod his head along to it as though he'd been waiting his whole life for exactly this song. Under the music ran the steady rumble of wheels on a wooden floor, and over it the high, carrying shrieks of children, and somewhere a tannoy was announcing that the next session would be a disco skate in a voice that seemed to think this was tremendously exciting news.
Harry paid at a little kiosk with Muggle money — he kept some by, the way you might keep a torch in a drawer, for occasions exactly like this — and they were directed to a long counter where a bored teenager with a great many earrings asked them their shoe sizes and produced, from shelves stacked high behind her, two pairs of skates. Not the thin-wheeled sort Harry had half expected, but old-fashioned ones, four wheels each in two pairs, front and back, the boots a scuffed pale blue that had clearly been worn by a thousand other feet. There was a small black rubber stopper on the front toe of each.
James held his pair up to the spinning coloured lights as though they were made of gold.
"Boots," he breathed, "with wheels."
"Boots with wheels," Harry agreed.
They sat on a carpeted bench at the edge of the floor to put them on. The carpet was a swirling, headache-making purple and black, the sort of pattern Harry suspected had been chosen specifically so that nobody could ever tell what had been spilled on it. James got the laces in a hopeless tangle within seconds and Harry knelt down on the carpet in front of him to sort it out, threading the long laces through the hooks at the top and pulling them snug.
"Not too tight?"
"No. Do them tighter. I want them really tight so I go really fast."
"That isn't quite how it —" Harry began, and then stopped himself, because there are some things a person has to find out for himself, and tied them the way James wanted.
He laced up his own next. The boots felt strange and heavy and familiar all at once, in a way he couldn't have explained — as though some part of him further down than memory recognised them. He couldn't have told you the last time he'd worn a pair. He wasn't sure he ever properly had. There had certainly been no roller rinks in the life the Dursleys had given him; the closest he had ever come was watching other children from a distance, the way he had watched most things. And yet.
He stood up. He did it without thinking about it, the way you stand up out of any chair, and the wheels rolled a little under him and he simply — went with it, his weight settling, his knees giving the small amount they needed to. He glided a step across the rubber matting to the gap in the barrier and stood there easily, hands loose at his sides, as though he'd done it every day of his life.
He hadn't. That was the strange part. He just had it, somehow, the same way he had always had a broom under him — found his balance on the first try and never thought about it again, while around him everyone else clutched and wobbled and worked at it. He had stopped, years ago, asking himself why certain things came to him like that. They just did. It was no more explainable than the colour of his eyes.
"Right," he said, turning back. "Your turn. Stand up nice and slow, and —"
James stood up.
For about half a second, he looked magnificent. He stood there grinning, arms out, king of the world.
Then his feet went.
They went in two completely different directions at once, as though they'd had a row and decided to live apart, and James's grin vanished and his arms began to windmill, and he made a noise like a startled goose, and Harry got a hand under his arm just in time to stop him going straight down onto the purple carpet.
"Whoa — there we go — I've got you —"
"They moved!" said James, outraged, clinging to Harry's forearm with both hands. "They just — they went on their own!"
"That's rather the idea," said Harry, holding him steady. "That's what the wheels are for."
"Well, I don't want them going on their own."
Harry bit down on a smile. "Let's get you to the rail," he said. "We'll start there."
***
They got him to the rail.
It took some doing. The rail ran all the way round the edge of the rink, a padded barrier at about the height of James's chest, and James went along it the way a man might go along the edge of a cliff in a high wind — hand over hand, white-knuckled, his feet skidding out from under him in little panicked bursts that he kept catching at the last possible moment by clutching the rail harder. He had stopped grinning some time ago. His face had set into a fierce, determined scowl that Harry knew very well, because it was the face James made over a puzzle, or a difficult bit of broom flying, or anything at all that had had the cheek to be harder than he'd expected.
The trouble was that James was not used to things being hard.
He was good at things. He was good at almost everything, and had been from the start, in the offhand way of a child who has never had cause to doubt it. He had been flying since he was barely more than a toddler, fearless on a little training broom that hovered a careful two feet off the lawn, and then less careful, and then — at six, to Ginny's horror and Harry's badly hidden pride — not careful at all, swooping round the garden and over the orchard wall as though he'd been born in the air. He climbed everything. He learned the words to spells he had absolutely no business knowing. He could charm any grown adult who came to the house within about four minutes flat. The world had a way of arranging itself nicely under James Potter, and James had never had any reason to suppose it would do otherwise.
And here was a wooden floor and a pair of pale blue boots, declining to cooperate.
Other children went past them, round and round, in a steady cheerful stream. A girl who couldn't have been older than five whisked by with her hands clasped behind her back, looking faintly bored. A knot of boys James's own age went tearing past in a pack, shouting, weaving in and out of one another, and one of them glanced at James clinging to the rail and Harry felt the look land on his son like a small hot coal. James's ears went red. He set his jaw and shoved off the rail and tried to go after them.
He managed perhaps three steps. They were fast, scrabbling, furious little steps, his feet going much quicker than the rest of him, and the wheels were sliding and his arms had started to windmill again and his body, terrified, was tipping backwards even as his legs raced forwards, and the whole thing held together for one impossible second before it didn't, and James sat down hard on the wooden floor with a smack that Harry felt in his own teeth.
"James —"
"I'm fine."
He was up again before Harry could reach him, hauling himself up by the rail, and there was a wet brightness at the edges of his eyes that he was furiously refusing to let go anywhere. He pushed off again. He fell again, sideways this time, catching himself on his hands. Up again. The set of his shoulders had gone past determined and into something close to despair, the particular grim hopelessness of a child who has decided, in the space of about ten minutes, that he is going to be bad at this forever.
"James. James, hold on a second —"
"I just need to do it faster," James said, and there was a real crack in his voice now. "If I just go fast enough then —"
He shoved off the rail one more time, hard, on pure stubbornness, and his feet shot clean out from under him, both of them at once, and he came down on the seat of his jeans in the middle of the rink with the bigger boys swerving round him, and this time he did not get up.
He sat there. He put his head down so the light couldn't get at his face. His shoulders were shaking, just slightly, and he had his hands flat on the floor on either side of him as though to hold the whole world still.
Harry skated over — easily, without thinking, the way he did everything on these wheels — and lowered himself down to sit on the floor beside him, right there in the path of the traffic, so that the other skaters had to part and go round the two of them like water round a stone.
"Hey," he said. "Hey. Come here."
"Don't," said James, to the floor. "Everyone's looking."
"Nobody's looking," said Harry, which was nearly true. "And if they are, they can mind their own business."
For a while he didn't say anything else. He just sat, his shoulder against James's shoulder, and let the music thump on over them and the wheels rumble past, and waited. He was good at waiting. It was about the only thing the war had taught him that he was glad to keep.
At last James said, in a tight, wretched little voice, still not lifting his head, "I'm rubbish at it."
"You've been doing it for ten minutes," said Harry.
"Everyone else can do it. That little girl can do it. She's about four."
"That little girl's been coming here every Saturday since she could walk, I'd put money on it." Harry nudged him gently with his shoulder. "You don't know how long it took her. You only saw her now, when she's good. You didn't see all the times she sat down on the floor exactly like this."
James was quiet. Then, in a rush, as though it had been waiting behind his teeth the whole time and had finally got past them:
"I can fly. I can fly really well, you've seen me, I can fly better than Albus and better than half the bigger kids and I'm not even scared up high, not even a bit, and it's easy, it's the easiest thing there is —" His voice wobbled and he steadied it furiously. "So why can't I do this? It's just the ground. There isn't even anywhere to fall. Why is it so hard?"
And there it was.
Harry looked at the top of his son's bent head, at the unruly black hair that was so exactly his own, and felt something turn over quietly in his chest. He thought, not for the first time and not for the last, that nobody had ever sat down on a floor next to him when he was eight. Nobody had ever come and put a shoulder against his shoulder and waited for him to be ready to talk. He had learned everything from a father figure that explained everything through jokes and pranks and love. And here was this boy who would never have to do that, who had a father who could simply be here, on a Saturday morning, on a dirty wooden floor, with all the time in the world — and the only thing wrong, the only thing in the whole world that was wrong, was that James couldn't do roller skating yet.
Harry would have given a very great deal, once, for that to have been the worst of his problems.
"Can I tell you something I've noticed?" he said.
James gave a small shrug that meant yes.
"You're trying too hard."
That got James's head up at last. He looked at Harry with his eyes red-rimmed and indignant. "I'm trying really hard."
"I know," said Harry. "That's the problem."
***
"Look at what you keep doing," Harry said. He'd got himself up onto his knees, then to his feet, and he held out both hands. James took them, and Harry pulled him up, slow and careful, and got him steady, the two of them face to face in the middle of the rink with James's hands gripping Harry's. "Every time those wheels start to move, what do you do?"
"They go on their own," said James darkly. "I told you."
"Right. And what do you do about it?"
James thought. "I try to stop them."
"You try to fight them," said Harry. "You go stiff as a board and you grit your teeth and you try to win. I've been watching you. Your whole body's gone hard, look —" He squeezed James's hands and felt the rigid tension run all the way up his arms. "You can't win against the floor, James. You'll never win against the floor. The floor's bigger than you. You have to stop fighting it and just — go along with it."
"But if I go along with it I'll fall over."
"You're falling over now," Harry pointed out, reasonably. "How's the fighting working out?"
James opened his mouth, and shut it again. The corner of it twitched, very slightly, despite everything.
"Here's the thing," said Harry. "And you're not going to like it." He kept his voice easy. "You know how when you're on your broom, and you're hovering — just sitting still in the air, not going anywhere — and it sort of wobbles? Goes all twitchy under you? You have to keep correcting, little bit this way, little bit that way, and it's actually quite hard work to just stay still?"
James's brow creased. He knew this. Of course he knew this. "Yeah," he said slowly.
"And then you start moving, and all of a sudden it's smooth? Steady as anything? You can take your hands right off and it'll fly itself straight as an arrow?"
"...Yeah."
"A broom's never steadier than when it's moving," said Harry. "It's the hovering that's the tricky bit. Everyone thinks flying fast is the hard part, but it isn't, not really. The hard part's holding still." He let that land. "And that's exactly what you've been trying to do this whole time. You've been trying to stand still. On wheels. And standing still on wheels is just about the hardest thing there is. You've been doing the hardest possible version of this, over and over, and getting cross with yourself for being bad at it."
James stared at him. Harry could practically see the cogs going round behind his eyes — could see him not wanting it to be true, and seeing that it was.
"So I should go faster?" said James suspiciously. "That's what I kept saying —"
"Not faster," said Harry. "You went at it like a Bludger every time. That's not the same as moving. That's just falling over very energetically." James snorted, surprised into it. "I mean smooth. Easy. Like the broom. You don't yank a broom about, do you? You don't grab the handle and wrench it round when you want to turn. You just lean, a tiny bit, and shift your weight, and it goes where you want it because you asked it nicely. Small movements. It feels what you're thinking and it does it. Yeah?"
"Yeah," said James, and there was something different in his voice now, something coming alive. He understood brooms. Brooms he understood all the way down.
"It's the same," said Harry simply. "It's exactly the same. Wheels, broom — doesn't matter. The trick's the same. Stop gripping. Stop fighting. Small movements. Lean into it instead of pulling away from it. And trust the thing under you to hold you up, because that's what it's for, and the second you stop trusting it is the second it drops you. On a broom and on the floor, same as each other. Fear makes you stiff, and stiff makes you fall. Every single time."
James was very still, listening. The fierce scowl had gone. In its place was the look he wore when he was really learning something — open, hungry, completely there.
"Okay," said Harry. "Bend your knees."
James bent them.
"More. Properly. Get down low, like you're about to sit on a chair that isn't there." James got lower, wobbling. "Good. That's good. Now — your nose." Harry tapped his own. "Where's your nose been this whole time? Pointing up at the ceiling, because your body keeps trying to sit down backwards. That's why you keep landing on your bum. You have to get your nose out over your toes. Lean forwards. I know it feels mad. Lean forwards anyway. I've got you. I'm not letting go."
James leaned forwards, slowly, terror written all over him, until his weight came over the front of his feet — and Harry felt it the moment it happened, felt the whole frantic instability of the boy go quiet, like a kettle coming off the boil.
"Oh," said James.
"There it is," said Harry softly. "Feel that?"
"It went — it went still —"
"That's it. That's the whole thing. Now we don't go fast and we don't go slow. We go nowhere at all, first. Just stand. Just feel it holding you up. Knees soft, nose over your toes, hands where you can see them." James stood, gripping Harry's hands, breathing hard, but standing — actually standing, balanced, not skidding. "Look at that," murmured Harry. "Look at you. You've been on your feet ten seconds and you haven't fallen. That's the longest you've gone all morning."
James let out a slightly hysterical little laugh. "Don't — don't say that, you'll jinx it —"
"Now," said Harry. "Little steps. Not skating. Marching. Like a penguin. Little tiny steps on the spot, that's all, just to get the feel of it — there — left — right — that's it —"
James marched, tiny duck-footed steps in place, his tongue between his teeth, and the wheels gave little obedient rolls beneath him and held, and held, and held.
***
Harry skated backwards.
He hadn't known he could do that either, until he tried it, and then his feet simply did it — he moved off backwards in front of James, smooth and slow, drawing him along by both hands the way every father has drawn along every child on every rink in the history of the world, though Harry didn't know that and wouldn't have cared. He knew only that James was moving — really moving now, gliding, towed along behind him in a long unbroken roll with his knees bent and his nose over his toes, his eyes huge.
"I'm doing it," James said, in a whisper, as though saying it too loud might break it. "Dad. Dad. I'm doing it. I'm actually doing it —"
"You're doing it," Harry agreed. He kept his face calm and his voice calm because he could feel how close the whole thing was balanced, how a single wrong note might send it all to pieces. Inside, his chest had gone tight and warm. "Look ahead, not down. Don't look at your feet — the second you look at your feet you'll start fussing at them again. Look where you're going. Look at me."
James looked at him. They went round like that, the two of them, slow and stately, James towed backwards— forwards, Harry corrected himself, James going forwards, Harry going back — in a great wide circuit of the rink, weaving between the other skaters, the coloured lights wheeling over them and the music thumping and James's face shining.
"Now," said Harry. "I'm going to let go of one hand."
"No —"
"Just one. You won't even notice. I've still got the other one. Ready?"
He let go of one hand. James didn't fall. James gripped the remaining hand for dear life and didn't fall, kept gliding, his free arm flung out for balance like a tightrope walker's.
"Good," said Harry. "Brilliant. Now push, just a little — with your other foot — push out to the side and let it carry you — like — there — yes —"
James pushed, and glided, and pushed, and glided, finding the rhythm of it, the long lovely roll of it, and Harry kept pace beside him now, one hand still loosely in James's, not pulling, just there, the way he wanted always to be there, a hand within reach if it was wanted and out of the way if it wasn't.
"I'm going to let go of the other one," said Harry.
This time James didn't argue. He couldn't, perhaps. He had got somewhere past arguing.
Harry let go.
For a moment — a long, swooping, marvellous moment — James Potter skated entirely on his own. Wobbling, yes, arms out, knees bent, going about as fast as a determined toddler, but skating, alone, no hand to hold and no rail to clutch, gliding free across the wooden floor with the lights spinning over his hair —
— and then a smaller child cut across in front of him, and James panicked, and forgot every single thing he had just learned, and went stiff as a board, and his feet shot out, and he sat down hard on the floor with an enormous smack.
There was a horrible half-second.
Then James Potter threw back his head and laughed.
He laughed so hard he had to lie back on the floor. He laughed the way only children can laugh, with his whole body, helplessly, the tears that had been so close to falling for an entirely different reason now leaking out of the corners of his eyes for this one instead. Harry skated over and stood looking down at his son lying flat on his back in the middle of a Muggle roller rink, howling with laughter at the ceiling, and felt his own face crack open into a grin so wide it hurt.
"That," James gasped, "was the BEST ONE."
"That was a beauty," Harry agreed gravely.
"Did you see it? Did you see how far I — and then I just —" He flopped his arms and legs to demonstrate. "Splat."
"Splat," said Harry. "Textbook splat. Top marks."
James held up a hand and Harry pulled him to his feet, and James, still giggling, still wobbling, did not reach for the rail. He found his own balance — knees soft, nose over toes — and stood there steady on his own two wheeled feet, beaming up at his father, and Harry thought that he would remember the way James looked in that exact moment for the rest of his life.
"I fell over loads," James said. He sounded, of all things, almost proud of it now.
"You did."
"And it didn't even matter."
"No," Harry said. "It didn't even matter."
***
He taught James the toe stop after that, the little rubber stopper on the front of each boot — how you turned one foot out and dipped your toe down to drag yourself to a halt — and James loved this more than anything that had come before, because it meant he could go fast and then stop, dramatically, with a great theatrical screech of rubber, and he did it over and over, building up speed down the long side of the rink and then throwing out a toe and grinding to a wobbling, triumphant standstill, arms up like he'd just scored the winning goal in a Quidditch final.
"Watch this one! Dad! Watch! Are you watching?"
"I'm watching."
"You're not watching, you have to actually watch —"
"I'm actually watching, James, I promise, I haven't blinked in about a minute, go on."
And James would go, and stop, and shout did you see, did you SEE, and Harry would say I saw, every single time, because he had learned a long time ago that the whole of fatherhood was very nearly contained in those two words, said often enough and meant every time. I saw. I'm watching. I'm here. It cost nothing and it was worth everything, and no one had ever said it to him, and so he said it now until his throat was hoarse with it and would happily have gone on saying it all day.
They skated together for the better part of an hour more. James got steadily, visibly better — not good, not yet, but better, his glides getting longer and his falls getting fewer, and somewhere in the middle of it he stopped thinking about it altogether, which Harry knew was the real moment a thing got into your bones: when you forgot to be frightened of it, when your body simply did it and your mind was free to be somewhere else. They raced, once, a wobbling, hopeless, hilarious race that James won only because Harry let him, and James knew Harry had let him win and didn't care a bit, and crowed about it anyway. The disco skate ended and a different session started and the lights changed colour, and a song came on that James decided, on no evidence whatsoever, was his song now, and he sang along to a tune he didn't know with words he was making up as he went.
At last, when James's legs had gone wobbly with the good kind of tiredness and he'd started to miss his footing more from being worn out than from being bad, Harry steered them off the floor and back to the headache-coloured carpet.
"Drink?" he said.
There was a snack bar at one end, all sticky surfaces and bright plastic, and Harry bought James a fizzy drink of an electric blue colour that nature had certainly never intended, and a paper tray of chips that were too hot and too salty and exactly right, and they sat on the carpeted bench in their skates with the rink rumbling away in front of them and the lights still turning, and ate.
For a while James was too busy to talk, which for James was rare enough to be worth noticing. He drank his blue drink and got blue all round his mouth and didn't notice, and ate his chips, and watched the other skaters with the proprietary, knowing eye of a person who had now Done This Himself.
Then he said, not looking at Harry, suddenly very interested in a chip, "I'm sorry I got upset before."
"You don't have anything to be sorry for."
"I did, though. I cried. A bit." He scowled at the chip. "I didn't want to be rubbish at it. Not — " He stopped, and went on more quietly. "Not when it was just us. I wanted it to be a good day. And then I couldn't do it and I thought I was wrecking it."
Harry put his arm round him then, blue drink and chips and all, and pulled him in against his side, and felt the warm solid weight of him, this person he had made, who had been worrying — all that time, under all that frustration — not about being bad at skating, but about spoiling the day. About letting Harry down. As though there were any version of this morning that could possibly have been less than perfect. As though Harry's love for him were a thing that had to be earned with a clean run round a roller rink.
"James," he said. "Listen to me. You want to know the best bit of today?"
James shrugged against him.
"It wasn't the skating," said Harry. "The skating was good. The splat was a real highlight, I'll grant you. But it wasn't the best bit." He paused. "The best bit was that I got to be here. With you. The whole morning, just us, like you said." He felt his throat do something and pressed on through it. "You could have been the worst skater in the entire history of the world — worse than you were even, which is saying something —" James let out a wet, indignant laugh — "and it would still have been the best morning I've had in a fortnight. Maybe longer. Because it was you. That's the whole thing. That's all it ever is. Do you understand me?"
James was quiet. Then he nodded, his face pressed against Harry's side.
"I've not been home much lately," Harry said. It wasn't easy to say. He said it anyway. "I know that. Work's been — it's been a lot, and that's not your fault and it's not anything you did, but I know you've noticed, and I'm sorry for it. You shouldn't have had to ask your mum whether I could come. You should just be able to ask me." He squeezed him. "So. Next Saturday. Whatever happens at work. You and me, back here, and you're going to teach me the toe stop, because I'm fairly sure you're already better at it than I am."
James sat up. The blue ring round his mouth made him look about five, and the disbelief on his face made him look about five too. "Really? Next Saturday? You promise?"
"I promise."
"And you won't — something won't come up? At the office?"
"Something might," said Harry honestly, because he would not lie to him, not about this. "Things do. But if it does, I'll move it, or I'll send someone else, or I'll deal with it, because I'm the boss and bossing it about is one of the very few good things about the job." James grinned. "But I won't let it move you. Not again. All right? You've got my word."
And James, who was eight, and who took the word of his father as the most solid thing in the universe, the bedrock under everything, nodded once and was satisfied, and went back to his chips, and the matter was closed.
They sat a while longer. The lights turned. Somewhere a child shrieked with laughter and somewhere another one cried, briefly, and was comforted, and the music thumped on, and the great cheerful river of skaters went round and round in front of them.
"Dad," said James presently, around a mouthful of chips.
"Mm?"
"When we come back next week. D'you reckon I'll be able to skate backwards? Like you?"
Harry looked at his son — blue-mouthed, salt-fingered, tired and happy, already planning, the morning's despair forgotten as completely as though it had never been, the way only the very young can forget — and thought about the strange unearned grace that had let him stand up on wheels that morning as easily as breathing, the same grace that had put him on a broom all those years ago and never once asked him why he deserved it. He thought it was the closest thing to magic he had, the ordinary kind, the kind that nobody studied at school. And he thought that if he could give James nothing else — and he could give him a great deal, he was determined to give him everything — he could at least give him this: a father who came back, who moved the meeting, who said I saw and meant it, who knelt down on the dirty floor and stayed until the thing got into the bones.
"I reckon," said Harry, "that if you keep going the way you're going, you'll be skating backwards in no time."
"Better than you?"
"Oh, definitely better than me. Within the month, I'd say."
"Yes," said James, with enormous satisfaction, and finished his drink.
They handed the boots back in at the long counter, and the bored teenager took them without looking up, and they walked out into the ordinary grey afternoon, James limping slightly and chattering without pause about the toe stop and the splat and how he'd nearly caught up with Harry in the race, nearly, and how next time he'd win for real, and Harry listened to every word of it, all the way home.
He didn't notice he was tired anymore. He had stopped being tired somewhere around the first splat, and hadn't started again. The fortnight at the office had let go of him at last, somewhere on that wooden floor, and gone wherever such things go, and for the first time in a long while Harry Potter walked along with his son's hand in his and nothing at all sitting on his shoulders.
It was, he thought, a very good morning.
He could not wait for Saturday.