Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Vernon Dursley liked a day to behave itself. He liked to start with a boiled egg and the Daily Mail, to carry on through a sensible number of telephone calls about drills, and to end with his slippers, the six o'clock news, and absolutely nothing he'd have to explain to anybody.

The first of November 1981 did not behave at all.

It started badly at breakfast. Dudley, fifteen months old and having recently discovered he could throw things, was throwing things.

"Who's a strong boy?" Vernon asked, ducking as a spoonful of porridge flew. "Who's going to be a prop forward? Is it you? Is it?"

Dudley threw his bowl.

"Vernon, don't encourage him," said Petunia from the cooker. She wore her quilted dressing gown, reading the Daily Mail over the frying pan, with one eye on the window. "Mrs. Number Six has had a man round again. That's the third time this week. A man in a van."

"A plumber, Pet."

"Nobody needs that much plumbing." She flipped the bacon. "Which tie are you wearing?"

Vernon looked down at himself. "This one."

"Wear the blue one. You've got the Swindon people at ten."

He went upstairs, changed into the blue one as always, and came back down to kiss Petunia on the cheek. He tried to kiss Dudley too, but Dudley was having a tantrum about a rusk and was hitting the tray of his highchair with both fists, which Vernon took as a sign of character.

"Little tyke," he chuckled, and went out to the car.

It got worse from there. It began at the end of Privet Drive, where a tabby cat sat on the pavement with its nose bent over the street sign, as if checking the spelling. Vernon braked, stared, and looked again. The cat looked back at him with chilly patience. He drove off, telling himself firmly that it had been the light, or his glasses, or the egg.

Then there were the people in the town center. They were dressed in long, flapping cloaks: bottle green, violet, one in a sort of startling tartan. They stood in little huddles on the pavements, whispering with their heads together, and not one of them seemed the slightest bit embarrassed. Vernon put it down to students. Students would wear anything.

Then there were the owls. The first went past his office window at half past ten, sailing along in broad daylight as if it had somewhere to be. The second came at eleven. By lunch the typing pool had stopped typing altogether and was crowded at the window, pointing. Vernon, who had never in his life seen an owl outside a nature program, shut his blinds and shouted at a man in Swindon.

At one o'clock he crossed the road for a currant bun. Outside the bakery, another cluster of cloaked people stood. As he passed, two words floated out of their whispering, and stopped him dead on the pavement.

"—Lily and James—"

"—and the little one. Harry. They say the little one…"

Vernon stood very still, holding his paper bag.

Lily. That was her name, the sister. The one they didn't talk about. Lily, who had married some long-haired layabout called Potter, in a ceremony where half the guests had arrived wearing what looked like curtains. And there was a boy. Petunia had read about him in a letter last summer, one she hadn't answered. She'd gone very quiet for an entire evening, and the subject never came up again.

Plenty of Lilys about, he told himself. Plenty of Harrys. It meant nothing.

He went back to the office and sat at his desk for forty minutes without picking up the phone.

At ten to two, he picked it up.

He held the receiver against his ear and listened to the dial tone for some time, as if it might have advice for him. Through the slats of the blind he could see the typing pool. Mrs. Pargeter, who had worked at Grunnings since before Vernon was born and claimed to have typed the original patent for the cordless screwdriver, was standing on a chair with a pair of opera glasses.

"Fourteen," she announced to the room. "That's fourteen since dinner. I'm writing to the Telegraph."

Vernon put the receiver down again.

He could not, he decided, telephone his wife in the middle of a working afternoon to ask whether her sister was dead. That was not a thing a man did between meetings. It was not, as far as Vernon knew, a thing a man did at all. You could not say it over a telephone line in an office with thin walls and a typing pool full of owl enthusiasts. You could not say it anywhere.

And what would he say, anyway? Some people in fancy dress said a name outside a bakery. Petunia would go white and quiet the way she did, and then she would want to know what he'd been doing outside the bakery when he was supposed to be on a diet.

He picked up a folder instead and opened it. It was the Swindon contract. He had read it four times already that week. He read it a fifth time and didn't take in a single word.

Lily.

He had met her exactly three times, and he hadn't enjoyed any of them.

The first was in the spring of 1977, at Evans' house in Cokeworth, when he and Petunia had been courting for six months and it was time he met the family. Mr. Evans had shaken his hand firmly and asked about drills, which was more than most people bothered us to do. Mrs. Evans had made a trifle. And then the back door had banged open, and a red-haired girl of seventeen had come in from the garden with mud on her knees and a smile like somebody had switched on a lamp. She'd said, "So you're Vernon! Tuney never stops talking about you," and Petunia had gone the color of the trifle.

Vernon had liked her, for about an hour. Then he'd noticed that the teacups on the draining board were washing themselves.

Nobody had said anything. Mrs. Evans had simply put a tea towel over them. Lily had laughed and said, "Sorry, sorry, I forget I'm not allowed at home," and Petunia had stared at her plate as though she wanted to fall into it. On the bus back to the station, Petunia had held his hand very tightly and said, "She's at a special school. In Scotland. For— for people like her. We don't talk about it."

"What do you mean, people like her?" Vernon had asked.

And Petunia had told him. Not much. Enough. Vernon Dursley had gone home that night and lain awake trying to fit it into his head, and it wouldn't go, so he did what he always did with things that wouldn't go. He put it in a box marked NOT MY BUSINESS and left it there.

The second time had been dinner at a restaurant in London, the year after, when Lily brought her young man to meet them. Potter. James Potter. All hair and teeth and glasses, and a way of lounging in his chair as though he owned the restaurant and might buy the street next. Vernon had asked him what car he drove, which was a perfectly ordinary question, and Potter had grinned and said he didn't, he mostly flew, and his friend had a motorbike that didn't need a road. Vernon had asked what line of work he was in. Potter had said he hadn't quite decided, but there was a war on, and he expected he'd be fighting in it.

"What war?" Vernon had said. "There isn't a war on."

And Lily had touched Potter's arm, and Potter had stopped grinning. For one second he'd looked at Vernon with something that Vernon, at the time, took for pity. Thinking about it now, at his desk at Grunnings with the blinds shut, he wasn't sure it had been pity. He thought it might have been envy.

The third time had been the wedding. The less said about the wedding, the better.

After that there had been nothing at all for years. Not a card, not a phone call. Then last summer there had been a letter, the first since the wedding, with a photograph inside. Petunia had read the letter at the kitchen table, put it back in its envelope, and gone upstairs without a word. Vernon had found the photograph a week later in the drawer of her bedside table, under her Bible, when he was looking for the nail scissors. It was a baby on a broomstick. A toy broomstick, about a foot off the carpet, with a fat, dark-haired baby clinging to it and shrieking with laughter, and a red-haired woman's arms reaching into the edge of the frame to catch him.

He had put it back exactly where he'd found it.

Vernon closed the Swindon folder.

"Mr. Dursley?" His secretary, a nervous young woman called Glenys, put her head round the door. "Sorry. It's only, the Swindon people are on line two. They want to know if you're still happy with the March delivery date, or if you need more time."

"Tell them March is fine."

"They also want to know," Glenys added, looking down at her notepad, "if we've had owls here too. They've had nine."

"Tell them," said Vernon, with enormous dignity, "that Grunnings does not discuss owls."

Glenys withdrew. Vernon sat for a long time looking at the closed door.

At five o'clock, on the steps outside Grunnings, a wizened little man in a violet cloak trotted straight into him, bounced off his stomach, and then, instead of apologizing, flung both arms around Vernon's middle and squeezed.

"Oh, what a day!" the little man cried, his face crinkled with joy. "Never mind, never mind, sir, I'm not hurt! How could anybody be hurt today? He's finished! Gone! After all these years! Oh, you lucky Muggle, you'll never know how lucky you are!"

He let go and pottered down the high street, singing to himself.

Vernon didn't know what a Muggle was. He had a horrible sinking feeling that his wife would.

*   *   *

He drove home slower than usual.

He didn't put the radio on. He stopped at every amber light. He noticed, on the ring road, that he was holding the steering wheel so hard his knuckles had gone white, and he made himself let go one finger at a time.

There were more of them. Cloaked people on the corner by the petrol station. Two old men in pointed hats on a bench outside the library, passing a bottle back and forth and singing. A woman in a purple turban waving at every car that went by, including his, as though they were all old friends. Vernon didn't wave back. He drove past with his eyes fixed on the road and his jaw set.

When he turned into Privet Drive, everything looked normal. Hedges clipped square. Cars washed. Number Six's net curtains twitching. The tabby cat was on the garden wall of Number Four, sitting perfectly still, watching him.

"Shoo," said Vernon, getting out of the car.

The cat didn't shoo.

"Go on. Clear off. Go home."

The cat looked at him with an expression that he would remember, much later, as very nearly a raised eyebrow. Vernon decided he was not going to argue with a cat, picked up his briefcase, and went inside.

The house smelled of shepherd's pie. Dudley was in the bath, shrieking happily and drowning a plastic duck. Petunia was kneeling beside the tub with her sleeves rolled up and her face turned away, and when she said, "You're late," her voice was perfectly ordinary.

"Traffic," said Vernon.

"Was it bad?"

"Peculiar." He loosened the blue tie. "There were people out in cloaks again. All over town. And owls. Glenys says the Swindon lot had nine."

"Did they," said Petunia, scrubbing Dudley's ears so hard that he stopped splashing and looked at her in surprise.

Vernon stood in the bathroom doorway in his socks. Dudley grinned at him, with the gap where his tooth hadn't come through yet, and held up the duck.

"Dad-dad. Duck."

"That's right, son. Duck." Vernon cleared his throat. "Shall Daddy sing the bus one?"

"BUS!"

So he sang the bus one, standing in the bathroom doorway, flat and loud and out of time. Dudley shrieked with glee and banged the duck against the side of the bath. Petunia lifted him out and wrapped him in a towel, and she didn't look up once while Vernon sang. But when he got to the wheels going round and round, he thought her shoulders loosened, just a little.

They ate the shepherd's pie in front of the television, the way they only ever did on Fridays. Neither of them mentioned that it wasn't Friday.

*   *   *

The six o'clock news was all owls. The newsreader, smiling uncertainly, reported that birdwatchers from Cornwall to Northumberland had rung in about hundreds of owls flying in the middle of the day, in every direction at once. Nobody could explain it. The weatherman, chuckling into his tie, mentioned showers of shooting stars over Kent and Dundee. Somebody, he supposed, had been letting off their Bonfire Night rockets a few days early.

Petunia was on the sofa with Dudley asleep across her lap. Vernon cleared his throat.

"Petunia," he said, carefully. "I don't suppose you've heard anything from your sister lately?"

Every muscle in her body went still.

"No," she said. "Why?"

"Only, there's been some very peculiar business today. The owls. And there were a lot of—" He waved a hand. "—her sort of people about in town. In cloaks." He watched her face. "I just wondered if it had anything to do with her. With them. That's all." He hesitated. "Their boy's called Harry, isn't he?"

"Yes," said Petunia, in a voice like a pulled thread. "Harry."

Vernon looked at his wife for a long moment. He looked at her white knuckles gripping Dudley's blanket, and at her eyes fixed on the television, seeing nothing. Then he did what he always did when Petunia looked like that. He went and made her a cup of tea and didn't ask her anything else.

But he lay awake for a long time that night. He didn't know the tabby cat had been sitting on the garden wall of Number Four since breakfast and hadn't moved.

*   *   *

Shortly before midnight, an old man arrived on the corner of Privet Drive. He didn't walk there, or drive there. He was there, as if the night had folded open and let him out.

He was very tall and very thin, and very old, with a silver beard so long he'd tucked the end into his belt. He wore deep midnight-blue robes embroidered with small silver moons, and boots with heels and buckles. Half-moon spectacles sat on a nose that had plainly been broken at some point, possibly more than once. He looked up and down the street with bright, mild curiosity, like someone viewing a museum exhibit about an interesting tribe.

From a deep pocket in his robes, he drew a small silver object shaped like a cigarette lighter. He held it up and clicked it. The nearest streetlamp blinked out. He clicked again and again, walking slowly along the pavement until Privet Drive was dark. The only light left anywhere was two small green-gold points on top of a garden wall.

"Good evening, Minerva," Albus Dumbledore said.

The cat on the wall was no longer a cat. A tall, stern woman sat there in an emerald cloak, with square spectacles and black hair drawn back in a bun so tight it seemed to be holding her face in place.

"I might have known you'd spot me," she said stiffly.

"You were sitting with your paws together, my dear. No genuine cat has ever looked so disapproving."

"I've had a great deal to disapprove of," Professor McGonagall said. "I have sat on these bricks since dawn, Albus, and I've watched our whole world lose its head. Owls in broad daylight. Fireworks over Kent. Grown wizards dancing in the street in front of Muggles. Dedalus Diggle ought to be ashamed of himself." She drew a breath. Her voice dropped. "But is it true? What are they all saying? That he's gone. And that he went to Godric's Hollow, and found Lily and James, and…"

Dumbledore bowed his head.

"Yes," he said. "It is true. I am so very sorry, Minerva."

Professor McGonagall made a small, terrible sound and pressed her hand over her mouth.

For a while neither of them spoke. Dumbledore reached into a pocket and drew out a crumpled paper bag.

"Sherbet lemon?" he offered gently.

"A what?"

"A sherbet lemon. They're a kind of Muggle sweet. I'm extremely fond of them."

"No, thank you," said Professor McGonagall, her voice making it clear she didn't think this was a moment for sweets. She took a deep breath. "Albus, everyone is saying it, but I have to hear it from you. Is it true that You-Know-Who is really gone?"

"I do wish you would call him by his name, Minerva. Voldemort." Professor McGonagall flinched, but Dumbledore went on mildly, unwrapping a sweet. "I have never seen any sense in calling him You-Know-Who. Eleven years we've been whispering round it. It only makes him sound bigger than he is."

"That's all very well for you. He always kept his distance from you, Albus. Everybody knows it."

"He knew things I have never cared to learn."

"Because you have scruples, and he had none," said McGonagall, and Dumbledore, rather to her annoyance, looked pleased.

"And the boy?" she managed at last. "They say he turned on the boy. And couldn't do it."

"That is true also. Whatever Voldemort tried to do to Harry, it failed. It rebounded, and it broke him."

"But how?" McGonagall whispered. "How in the name of heaven did a baby survive that? When so many grown witches and wizards didn't?"

"We can only guess," said Dumbledore. "I have a guess. I may be wrong." He did not say what it was. "Either way, his power is broken, and the boy is alive."

Dumbledore looked up at the dark windows of Number Four. "And so I have brought Harry here, to his mother's sister. She and her husband are the only family he has left in the world."

"These people?" Professor McGonagall turned to stare at the house. "Albus, I've watched them all day. They are the most ordinary people I have ever seen. They have a gnome made of concrete in the back garden." But then she hesitated. "Although I'll admit that the husband sang to their little boy in the garden this morning. Very badly. Something about the wheels of a bus. And the woman—" She frowned. "The woman stood at that window this afternoon for nearly an hour. Just standing. As though she was waiting for bad news."

"I think she has been waiting for it for a great many years," said Dumbledore quietly. "And tonight, I am afraid, it will finally reach her." He drew a thick letter from inside his robes. "I've explained everything I can. And there is one more thing she can give Harry that nobody else alive can. When Lily died for him, she left a kind of magic in his blood. It will hold for as long as he has a home with someone who shares that blood. Petunia is the last of Lily's family. While Harry lives under her roof, nothing Voldemort's followers can do will reach him here."

"You've written it in a letter," said Professor McGonagall faintly. "You think a letter will be enough? Albus, he'll be famous. The most famous child in our world. People will sing songs about him, and they'll name their children after him. Every witch and wizard in Britain will know his face."

"Which is exactly why he must not grow up among them," said Dumbledore. "Imagine it, Minerva. Worshipped before he can walk, for something he'll never remember doing. It would twist any child out of shape. No. Let him have an ordinary life first, for as long as we can give him one. Let him be loved for himself. Then, when he's ready, we'll bring him home."

A deep, growling roar rose somewhere above them. They both looked up. A single headlight swept down from the clouds, and with thunder and a shudder through the ground, an enormous motorbike dropped from the sky and bumped to a halt in the middle of the road.

The man riding it was even more enormous. He was far too big to be allowed: a vast, shaggy shape of black hair, a wild beard, and a moleskin coat, so huge that the bike beneath him looked like a child's toy. Cradled very carefully in his huge arms was a bundle of blankets.

"Hagrid," said Dumbledore, relieved. "You found him. Whose motorbike is that?"

"Sirius's, Professor. Sirius Black's. He turned up at the house just after I got there, white as a sheet, sayin' he'd look after Harry himself. But I told him you'd sent me, an' you'd said where the boy was ter go. An' he gave me the bike, after. Said I'd get here quicker." Hagrid climbed off very carefully, as if the bundle was made of eggshells. "Little feller dropped off somewhere over the Severn. Didn't wake up once."

Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall bent over the blankets. Inside lay a very small boy with a tuft of black hair, fast asleep, his fist curled against his cheek. On his forehead, just above his left eye, was a thin, fresh cut shaped like a jagged bolt of lightning.

"Is that where…" Professor McGonagall whispered.

"Yes. He'll carry that scar for the rest of his life."

"Can't you do something about it, Albus?"

"Even if I could, I wouldn't. Scars can be useful things." Dumbledore looked down at the small sleeping face with great tenderness. "I have one myself, just above my left knee. It is a perfectly accurate map of the London Underground, although I'm afraid it doesn't show the newer lines."

At that, Hagrid let out a great, gulping, heartbroken sob.

"Hagrid," hissed Professor McGonagall. "The neighbors!"

"Sorry," wept Hagrid, burying his face in a handkerchief the size of a bathmat. "Sorry, Professor. On'y I keep thinkin' of Lily an' James, an' this little feller, an' now he's got ter go an' live with— with—"

"With family," said Dumbledore gently.

Hagrid gave an enormous sniff. "Could I— could I say goodbye to him, sir?"

"Of course."

Hagrid bent his great shaggy head over the bundle and gave Harry what must have been a very scratchy, very whiskery kiss on the forehead. Harry wrinkled his nose in his sleep and didn't wake.

Then Dumbledore took Harry from him.

He carried him up the neat garden path and laid him down on the doorstep of Number Four. He tucked the letter into the blankets. Then he stepped back to stand beside the others. For a long moment none of them said anything at all. They just looked at the little bundle on the step.

"Well," said Dumbledore at last. "There's nothing more for us to do here tonight. We may as well go and join the celebrations."

"Yeah," said Hagrid thickly. "I'd best get this bike back ter Sirius. G'night, Professor McGonagall. Professor Dumbledore, sir."

Hagrid mounted the bike, wiping his eyes on his coat sleeve, and with a roar and a shudder rose into the night sky and was gone. Professor McGonagall gave the doorstep one last look, and her stern face trembled for just a moment before she set it straight again. Then she was a tabby cat once more, slipping away along the wall into the dark.

Dumbledore walked to the corner. He raised the silver object and clicked it once. Along the road, the lights flew back into their lamps like birds returning to a hedge, and orange washed Privet Drive again.

"Good luck, Harry," he said softly. "She loved your mother more than she ever let herself say. I think, given the chance, she will love you too."

He turned on the spot, and with a faint swish of his robes, the corner was empty.

*   *   *

Petunia Dursley did not believe in omens. She believed in bleach, in net curtains, and in knowing exactly what the neighbors were up to. Omens were for people with untidy houses.

So when she woke at a quarter past midnight on the second of November with her heart going like a sewing machine, she told herself it was the cheese. Vernon had insisted on a second helping of the Stilton after dinner, and she'd had a sliver to keep him company, and that was all it was. Cheese.

She lay very still beside her husband, who slept the way he did everything, loudly and with total confidence. Down the hall, Dudley turned over in his cot and made a small sound, like a kettle beginning to boil. Petunia waited. He settled.

She had been dreaming about Lily.

That was the trouble. She hadn't dreamt about her sister in years, not properly, since the wedding. That was the last time they'd shared a room. Lily had worn flowers in her hair, and Petunia had worn the expression of a woman forced to eat soup through a straw. In the dream, though, they'd been little again, on the swings behind the old mill in Cokeworth, and Lily had been going higher and higher, laughing, until she let go at the very top and didn't come down.

She had not thought about the swings in years. She'd made a point of not thinking about them.

But lying there in the dark, with Vernon snoring and the bedroom clock ticking, she found she couldn't stop.

Spinner's End. The rec behind the old mill, with the rusted climbing frame and the swings, where nobody else's children went because the river smelled. She had been eleven and Lily had been nine, and Lily had jumped off at the very top of the arc, the way she always did, and come down slowly. Not fallen. Floated. As if the air had decided to be kind to her. And Petunia had screamed at her to stop it, Mummy said not to, Mummy said, and Lily had only laughed and said, "But look, Tuney, look what I can do."

There'd been flowers that opened and closed in Lily's palm, like little mouths. There'd been a boy, a thin, sallow, unwashed boy from the bottom of Spinner's End, who'd watched Lily from the bushes and told her she was special, and told Petunia, without even looking at her, that she was nothing at all.

And then there'd been the letter.

Petunia could still see it on the kitchen windowsill, held in the beak of a tawny owl that sat there, bold as brass, until Mum opened the window and let it in. Thick, yellowish paper, green ink, a red wax seal. It came on a July morning when Lily was eleven, and their father had read it at the kitchen table three times over before he understood it. Then he'd laughed out loud and picked Lily up and swung her round, and their mother had cried, and the whole house had filled up with a kind of joy that had nothing to do with Petunia at all.

A witch. Her little sister was a witch.

Petunia had gone upstairs and written a letter of her own, very carefully, in her best handwriting, to the headmaster of the school with the strange name. She had asked whether there might be a place for her too. She was a hard worker, she'd written. She would be no trouble. She would learn whatever she had to learn.

He had written back. She had never told anyone that, not even Lily. He had written back kindly, in that same green ink, a short and gentle letter saying that he was very sorry, but Hogwarts could only take students who had magic of their own, and that he hoped she would find, in time, that there was a great deal of wonder in the world without it.

She had torn it up into very small pieces and flushed them down the toilet. She had been thirteen years old. She had never forgiven Lily, or the headmaster, or the wonder.

On the platform at King's Cross that September, she had called her sister a freak.

She'd meant it to hurt, and it had. She had watched it land. She'd watched Lily's face crumple, and she had felt, for one hot, horrible moment, glad. Then Lily had climbed onto the scarlet train with that boy from Spinner's End, and the train had gone, and the gladness had gone with it, and nothing had come along to take its place.

Every summer after that, Lily had come home a little more of a stranger. She brought home books that hissed, a cat that wasn't quite a cat, and friends who arrived without using the front door. Every summer, Petunia had made herself a little smaller and harder, so that it wouldn't matter.

At the wedding, Lily had come up to her by the cake, in her white dress with flowers in her hair, and taken both her hands.

"I know you don't want to be here," she'd said. "I know. But I'm so glad you came, Tuney. I mean it. You're my sister."

And Petunia had taken her hands away, and said, "I have a train to catch," and left before the speeches.

That was the last time.

There had been nothing after that. Years of nothing. And then, last summer, one letter. Only one. Lily's round, warm handwriting, gone small and hurried. Things were bad, she wrote. They'd had to go into hiding, and she couldn't say where, and she couldn't say why. She was sorry about the wedding. She was sorry about everything.

Folded inside was a photograph. A fat, black-haired baby on a toy broomstick, laughing his head off, and Lily's arms reaching in from the edge of the picture to catch him. On the back: Harry, one year old. He'd love to meet his Aunt Tuney one day. So would I.

She had not written back. She had meant to. She had sat down twice with the good notepaper and both times put it away again. There would be time, she'd thought. When whatever it was had blown over. When things were less complicated.

Petunia lay in the dark with her eyes open.

There would be time, she told herself again. And knew, with a coldness that went all the way down to her feet, that she didn't believe it any more.

Petunia got out of bed. She put on her dressing gown and went to the window, because that was where she always went when something was wrong, and she twitched the curtain aside by one precise inch.

Privet Drive was dark. Darker than it should have been. She frowned. Every streetlamp was out, all the way to the corner, as if someone had gone along and pinched them like candles. On the low wall outside Number Four sat a tabby cat, perfectly upright, looking at the house.

Not at the street. At the house.

Petunia let the curtain fall. Then she lifted it again.

The cat was gone. There were people there instead. A tall, thin shape in what looked like a dressing gown far more ridiculous than her own, a woman in a pointed hat, and something very large indeed, as large as a wardrobe, bent over the front step. Something was crying. She could hear it through the glass, a great, wet, honking sob, like a walrus at a funeral.

Petunia Dursley knew what those people were. She had known people like that once. She had been related to one. That was what made it more terrifying than it needed to be.

She put her hand flat over her mouth and stood there, and she did not wake Vernon, and she did not go downstairs, and when the streetlamps came back on all at once, with a soft, cheerful pop, the street was empty, and the wall was just a wall.

She went back to bed, but she did not sleep.

*   *   *

At seven o'clock she went down to put out the milk bottles, because that was what she did at seven o'clock, and because if she did the ordinary thing, the night before would turn out to have been ordinary too.

She opened the front door to find a baby on the step.

He was wrapped in blankets and tucked into a sort of basket, like something left for collection. He was asleep. His fists were curled against his cheek, and a letter was tucked into the blankets, her name on the front in green ink, in a looping, old-fashioned hand.

Mrs. Petunia Dursley.

She did not scream. Later, whenever she told it, she would always say she'd screamed. Vernon remembered her screaming, and it was easier to let him believe it. But the truth was that she made no sound at all. She bent down very slowly, picked up the letter, opened it with hands that were not quite steady, and read it standing on her own front step in her slippers, in full view of Number Six.

She read it twice.

Then she sat down. Straight down, on the cold step, with the milk bottles beside her, and she took the baby out of the basket and held him in her lap, because her legs had stopped working and her arms needed something to do.

Lily was dead.

The letter said so in a great many careful, gentle words, and none of them helped. Lily was dead, and Lily's husband was dead, and something dreadful had come to their house and done it, and the dreadful thing was gone now, and this was Lily's boy.

He woke up. He looked at her.

He had her eyes. Not similar eyes, not the same color more or less. He had her eyes, Lily's eyes, the exact green of the bottle glass they used to hold up to the sun on the windowsill at home, looking out at her from a stranger's small, cross, sleepy face.

"Oh," said Petunia. It wasn't a word, just the sound of something giving way. "Oh, no. No, no, no."

The baby considered this. Then he sneezed.

That was how Vernon found them: his wife on the front step in her dressing gown, crying without making any noise, holding a baby who was not theirs, while Mrs. Number Six watched from behind her hydrangea with naked interest.

"Petunia?" said Vernon. "Pet? What on earth…?"

She held up the letter without looking at him. He took it. She heard him read it, heard his breathing change, heard the paper shake.

"Well," Vernon said eventually. "Well. Now. Now look here." He cleared his throat. He cleared it again. Vernon Dursley's throat-clearing was a well-known feature of the Grunnings drill company's board meetings. It could go on for some time. "We can't possibly. Pet. It's not— we've got Dudley, and the money, and those people— you know what your sister's lot are like, and if any of that comes into this house…"

He stopped because the baby reached up out of the blankets and took hold of his finger.

It was not a strong grip. The baby was fifteen months old and had had, by any measure, the worst night anyone in the world had ever had. But he held on, and he looked up at Vernon with Lily's eyes and a solemn, wobbly concentration, as if Vernon's finger were the one solid thing left in a world that had tipped over.

Vernon Dursley stood on his front step in his pajamas with a baby holding his finger, and for a long time he said nothing at all.

Mrs. Number Six leaned out so far over her hydrangea that she nearly fell into it.

"Right," said Vernon at last, gruffly, not taking his finger back. "Right. He'll need the small bedroom, then. I'll get the cot down from the loft. The old one, Dudley's old one. It's still got the…" He made a vague gesture. "The rabbits."

Petunia looked up at him.

"Well, don't look at me like that," said Vernon, going red. "What else are we going to do, leave him on the step? In November?" He scowled down the street, at the distant corner where the streetlamps had gone out. "People," he said, with enormous disgust, "who leave a baby on a doorstep in November want their heads looking at."

*   *   *

They sat at the kitchen table with the letter between them, like a bill neither of them could pay.

Dudley was in his highchair, eating toast soldiers with great concentration and watching the stranger in his mother's arms with round, unblinking eyes. Harry had a bottle. Petunia had found one of Dudley's old ones at the back of the cupboard, scalded it twice, and warmed the milk without thinking, testing it on her wrist the way her mother had taught her, as though her hands had been waiting all along to remember how. Harry drank it in small, fierce gulps, one fist wound tight into the collar of her dressing gown.

Vernon read the letter for the third time. Then he put it down, smoothed it flat with his palm, and read it a fourth.

"It says," he said at last, "that there's some sort of— protection. On him. While he lives here."

"Yes."

"Because of you. Because you're her sister." He looked up. "What does that mean, Pet? Blood. What's blood got to do with anything?"

"I don't know." It was the truth. "I don't know what any of it means. I was never told. I was never—" She stopped. "It's their sort of thing. It's not ours."

"And the man who did this." Vernon's voice dropped, though there was nobody to overhear them but two babies and the kettle. "The one who— your sister, and him. It says he's gone. Gone where? Dead? Locked up? Does it say? Because if he's only gone off somewhere, and he's got friends, and they know where this boy's been put—"

"It says he can't come here," said Petunia. "It says nothing of theirs can touch him here. Not while he's ours."

The word sat on the table between them.

Ours.

Vernon looked at it for some time. Then he looked at Dudley, who had decided toast was for throwing rather than eating and was now aiming at the cat flap. Then at Harry, who had finished the bottle and fallen asleep with his mouth open and a bead of milk on his chin, still holding on to Petunia's collar as if somebody might try to take her away.

"He's very small," Vernon said, in a strange voice.

"He's fifteen months. Same as Dudley."

"Dudley's not that small."

"Dudley," said Petunia, "is not small at all." And then, unexpectedly, she gave a short, cracked laugh, which turned in the middle into something else, and she had to put her free hand over her eyes.

Vernon got up. He came round the table and stood next to her chair, looking uncomfortable, and after a moment he put one large hand on the top of her head and left it there, the way you might steady a vase in a high wind.

"Now then," he said. "Now then, Pet."

She cried for a while. He let her. When she'd finished, he went into the hall and picked up the telephone, and Petunia heard him dial.

"Glenys? Vernon Dursley. Listen, I shan't be in today." A pause. "No, I'm not ill. Well. Yes. Put me down as ill." A longer pause. "Family matter. Tell the Swindon people I'll ring them tomorrow. And Glenys? If anyone asks about the owls, we don't know anything about the owls."

He put the receiver down and came back into the kitchen and stood in the doorway, his hands in his dressing-gown pockets.

"Nine years," he said, half to himself. "Nine years at Grunnings and I've never once taken a day off sick."

"You aren't sick."

"I'll be sick if I have to look at those Swindon figures again." He sat down heavily. He pulled the letter towards him, folded it in three, and put it into his dressing-gown pocket, as if that was the end of the matter, and in a way it was. "What do we call him, then?"

Petunia looked down at the sleeping baby.

"Harry," she said. "His name is Harry."

"Harry." Vernon tried it out, frowning, the way he tested a new drill bit. "Harry Dursley."

"Potter, Vernon."

"Yes. All right. Potter." He considered this. "It's not much of a name, Potter. Sounds like a man who mends teapots."

"Vernon."

"I'm only saying." He reached over and very cautiously, with one thick finger, wiped the milk off Harry's chin. Harry didn't wake. "Harry, then. Fine. Harry's a good, plain name. Nothing silly about Harry."

Across the table, Dudley threw his last toast soldier. It bounced off his father's ear and landed in the butter.

"Character," said Vernon weakly.

*   *   *

The cot came down from the loft. The rabbits were still on it. Vernon put it up in the small bedroom, swearing gently at the Allen key, then stepped back to look at it, went to the garden center, and came back with a moon-shaped nightlight, which he plugged in without a word to anybody.

Dudley, sitting in his highchair at teatime, examined his new cousin with the frank suspicion of a small king who has just learned there's to be a second king. Then he threw a rusk at him.

It hit Harry on the forehead, just beside the strange, thin, lightning-shaped cut the letter had said nothing about.

Harry blinked. Then he laughed.

It was the first time he'd laughed since he'd arrived. It was a small, hiccuping, astonishing laugh, as if he'd forgotten how. Delighted to have an audience, Dudley threw another rusk and laughed too. And Petunia, standing at the sink with a tea towel in her hands, had to turn quickly to face the window so nobody could see her face.

After tea, Dudley climbed down from his highchair, which he was not supposed to be able to do, toddled across the kitchen, and stood over Harry, who was sitting on a blanket on the floor. He put his hands on his hips, breathing heavily.

Petunia watched from the sink, ready to move.

Dudley looked at Harry. Harry looked at Dudley. Then Dudley turned round, toddled out of the kitchen, and climbed the stairs one at a time on his hands and knees, grunting with effort. Petunia went after him and found him in his own bedroom, rummaging in his toy box with the air of a man who had urgent business.

He came out with a knitted rabbit. It was gray and floppy and had lost one ear in an incident with the dog next door, back when Dudley was teething. It was the toy Dudley slept with every night. It was the toy Dudley screamed for if it went in the wash. It was, as far as Petunia knew, the single most important object in Dudley Dursley's life.

He carried it carefully back down the stairs, sliding on his bottom, and toddled back into the kitchen, and dropped it into Harry's lap.

"Dat," said Dudley firmly, and pointed at it. Then he pointed at Harry. "Dat."

Harry picked up the rabbit by its one ear and looked at it.

Then he put the ear in his mouth.

Dudley, apparently satisfied that this was the correct response, sat down on the kitchen floor beside him and began to take off his own socks.

Petunia had to go and stand in the garden for a few minutes.

That night, Dudley screamed for his rabbit for twenty minutes. Petunia went to fetch it back from Harry's cot, and found Harry fast asleep with the rabbit's one ear clutched tight in his fist. She stood there, and found she couldn't do it. She went and got Dudley's teddy bear down from the top of the wardrobe instead, the one Marge had sent that he'd never liked. Dudley accepted it under protest, and was asleep in five minutes.

The rabbit never went back. It became Harry's. And Dudley, who forgot most things, never forgot that he'd given it to him. Years later, when Harry was eight and Piers Polkiss said something nasty about it in the playground, Dudley sat on Piers until he took it back.

That night, after Vernon was snoring and both boys were asleep, she went to the airing cupboard on the landing and took down a box she had not opened in twelve years.

Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, was a blanket. A small one, knitted in lemon-yellow wool, softened with age. Their grandmother had made two, one for each of them. Petunia had kept hers in the box all these years. She'd never told anyone she still had it.

She went into the small bedroom, where the moon nightlight made everything silver, and she tucked the yellow blanket around Lily's son.

Then she sat down on the floor beside the cot, with her back against the wall and a notepad on her knees, and wrote by moonlight:

Lily,

He's here. He's safe. He has your eyes and, I'm sorry to say, very terrible hair.

I will do better with him than I did with you.

She didn't sign it. She didn't send it. There was nowhere to send it to. She folded it in half, put it in the box under where the blanket had been, and that was the first.

There would be a great many more.

*   *   *

Bonfire Night came three days later.

The Dursleys had always gone to the big bonfire on the rec at the end of Magnolia Crescent. Vernon liked a good bonfire. He liked the smell of it, and the hot dogs, and the chance to tell other men what they were doing wrong with their sparklers. He had bought a box of rockets in October and kept it on top of the wardrobe, out of reach of Dudley, who had not yet grasped the difference between a rocket and a lolly.

But on the fifth of November, with Harry less than a week in the house, Petunia said they'd stay in.

"He's not used to us yet. It'll be cold. Loud. Crowds of people." She was buttoning Dudley into his pajamas. "We'll watch from the window."

So they watched from the window. Vernon stood with Dudley on his hip, pointing out each rocket as it went up over the rooftops. Petunia held Harry in the armchair behind them, with the lights off so they could see better.

The first rockets were gold, and Harry watched them with wide, wondering eyes. The next were red, and silver, and a lovely one that split into blue stars and drifted down slowly over the garages, and Dudley shouted "AGAIN!" each time, as if his father were personally responsible.

Then somebody on Wisteria Walk let off a big one, and it burst high above Privet Drive in an enormous shower of green.

Harry screamed.

Petunia had never heard a sound like it. Not the three-in-the-morning crying. Not anything a baby ought to know how to make. He went rigid in her arms and screamed as if he were being burned, both hands clawing at his face, twisting away from the window as if he could get inside her. Dudley, frightened, started howling too. Vernon nearly dropped him.

"What is it? What's wrong with him? Pet—"

"The curtains. Vernon. Shut the curtains."

He yanked them shut so hard that one of the hooks gave. He put the big light on. He put the television on, loud, a man talking about the price of petrol. And Petunia sat in the armchair rocking Harry backward and forward and saying, "It's all right, it's all right, it's gone, it's gone," over and over, without knowing what she meant, until the screaming broke down into sobs, and then into hiccups, and then, at last, into silence.

He was soaked with sweat. His heart was going so fast against her chest that she could feel it through her cardigan, like a bird's.

Outside, the fireworks went on. Muffled now. Harmless.

Vernon stood in the middle of the living room with Dudley clinging round his neck, and he looked at Harry, and then at the closed curtains, and his face did something slow and complicated.

"It was the green one," he said quietly. "Wasn't it. He was all right till the green one."

Petunia didn't answer.

She was thinking of the letter. Something dreadful had come to their house and done it. Dumbledore hadn't said what. He hadn't said how. But she thought of what she had read, a long time ago, in one of Lily's schoolbooks left lying open on the kitchen table, before she had slammed it shut. And she thought that perhaps she could guess what color it had been.

"Right," said Vernon.

He went upstairs. She heard the wardrobe door. When he came back down, he was carrying the box of rockets. He went straight through the kitchen and out to the dustbin in the side passage. She heard the lid go down with a clang.

"No fireworks," he said, coming back in and wiping his hands on his trousers. "Not in this house. Not ever. I've never liked them anyway. Noisy, dangerous, waste of good money." He held out his arms. "Give him here. You take Dudley. He wants his mum."

She gave him Harry. Vernon held him awkwardly against his shoulder, patting his back with a hand the size of a dinner plate, and started walking round the living room. He didn't sing. He just walked, round and round the coffee table, talking in a low rumble about nothing at all. About drills, and the Swindon contract, and the price of petrol, and what a fuss everybody made about Bonfire Night, really, when you thought about it.

The Dursleys never went to the bonfire on the rec again. When Dudley asked why, years later, Vernon said that it had got too commercial.

*   *   *

It turned out that taking in a baby was mostly paperwork.

Nobody had told Petunia that. Dumbledore's letter had said a great deal about love and blood and protection, in long, careful, curling sentences. It had said nothing whatsoever about the doctor's surgery, or the health visitor, or the woman at the council office who wanted to know, with her pen hovering, exactly how Mrs. Dursley had come to have her nephew.

"Car accident," said Petunia, without blinking. "My sister and her husband. Very sudden."

She had decided on it in the bath the first night, and once Petunia Dursley chose a story, it became true. The woman at the council office wrote "road traffic accident" on her form and said she was so sorry. Mrs. Number Six, who had been hovering at the hedge for two days, near collapse with curiosity, was told the same thing over the garden fence and went off looking almost disappointed. By the end of the week the whole of Privet Drive knew that poor Petunia Dursley's sister had been killed in a dreadful crash on the motorway. They also knew the Dursleys had taken in the little orphan without a moment's hesitation, which was not like them at all.

Vernon, who had hesitated for about four seconds, didn't correct anybody.

The doctor was harder.

Dr. Ashworth had looked after Dudley since he was born. She was a brisk, gray-haired Scotswoman with cold hands and a warm laugh, and she ran her surgery on Magnolia Road like a ship. Petunia had always liked her, because she didn't waste time. That morning, sitting in the small, overheated consulting room with Harry on her knee, Petunia found that she would have given a great deal for Dr. Ashworth to waste some.

"Well, now, young man." Dr. Ashworth knelt down in front of them with her stethoscope. "Let's have a look at you."

She listened to his chest. She looked in his ears and down his throat. She weighed him, and frowned slightly at the scales, and wrote something down. She tested his reflexes with a little rubber hammer, and Harry, who had sat through everything else with deep suspicion, kicked her quite hard on the wrist.

"Good," said Dr. Ashworth, unoffended. "Nothing wrong with those." Then she brushed back his hair with one finger, and stopped.

Petunia had known she would. She had brushed his hair down over it every morning, and it never stayed.

"And how did he come by this?"

"Glass," said Petunia. "From the windscreen. In the accident."

Dr. Ashworth said nothing for a moment. She tilted Harry's head gently towards the window and studied the thin, red, jagged line. Harry put up with it. He was watching the goldfish tank in the corner.

"It's very clean," she said slowly. "For glass. Glass usually makes a mess. Little fragments. It tears." She touched the edge of it, very lightly. "This looks almost as if it was drawn on. Who stitched it?"

"I don't know. The hospital. It was— it all happened up north. I wasn't there."

"Hm."

Petunia's heart was thumping. She held Harry tighter and fixed her eyes on the eye chart on the wall.

"It isn't infected," said Dr. Ashworth. "It's healing, though not quite the way I'd expect. It'll leave a mark, I'm afraid. He'll have that for good." She sat back on her heels. "And otherwise?"

"Otherwise?"

"How's he sleeping? Eating? Is he settling in?"

Petunia opened her mouth to say fine. Everything was fine. And then, to her own horror, she heard herself say, "He screams. In the night. Every night at the same time. Five past three. You can set a clock by it. Nothing stops it. He screams as though— as though something's happening to him. And he calls for her."

Dr. Ashworth didn't say anything for a while.

Then she reached out and laid her cold hand, very briefly, over Petunia's.

"Mrs. Dursley," she said, "this child has lost both his parents. He's too young to understand it, but not too young to know. Babies remember more than we give them credit for. Not in words. In here." She touched her own chest. "He's grieving. It will take as long as it takes. What he needs from you is very simple and very hard. He needs to find you there, every single time, when he wakes up frightened. Until one night he stops being frightened. That's all."

"That's all," Petunia repeated.

"That's all, and it's everything." Dr. Ashworth stood up, knees cracking, and went back to her desk. "You're doing well. Both of you. I can see that." She glanced up. "And you? How are you sleeping?"

"I'm fine."

"I'm sorry about your sister."

Petunia looked down at Harry, who had found her watch strap and was trying to eat it.

"So am I," she said.

*   *   *

The health visitor came on a Wednesday, which Petunia had circled on the calendar in red.

She spent the whole of Tuesday cleaning a house that was already clean. She bleached the kitchen floor twice. She ironed the curtains. She rearranged the boys' toys three times, so that they would look played with but not untidy. At eleven o'clock at night, Vernon found her on her knees in the downstairs toilet, scrubbing the grout with an old toothbrush.

"Pet. It's a health visitor. Not the Queen."

"She'll write things down," said Petunia, scrubbing. "They always write things down. And then it's on a form, Vernon, and once a thing's on a form, it's true forever."

The health visitor was called Mrs. Crimp. She was a large, comfortable woman with a clipboard and a tremendous handbag, and she wrote things down from the moment she came through the front door.

She wrote down the boys' weights and heights. She wrote down that the small bedroom was warm and dry and had a nightlight. She asked a great many questions about feeding, and wrote down all the answers. She asked about the night waking, and wrote that down too, with a small sympathetic noise. She asked whether Harry had any family on his father's side, and Petunia said no, none at all, both his father's parents were dead, and that was true. Mrs. Crimp wrote it down. She asked whether there was anyone else who might want to be considered, a godparent, perhaps. Petunia thought of the huge, weeping shape on her doorstep in the dark, and of whoever else might be out there in that other world, wanting him. And she said, "No. Nobody."

Mrs. Crimp wrote that down as well.

Then she asked to see Harry walk.

"He doesn't, really," said Petunia, feeling that this was going on a form and would be true forever. "Not yet. He pulls himself up. He cruises along the furniture. But he won't let go."

"Some of them don't, at this age. Let's see."

So Petunia put Harry down on the living-room carpet, next to the coffee table, and he pulled himself up on it the way he always did and stood swaying there, holding on, looking at Mrs. Crimp with solemn distrust.

Across the room, Vernon, who had come home at dinnertime specially, got down on one knee by the armchair and held out his arms.

"Come on, then," he said. "Come to Uncle Vernon. Come on, son."

Harry looked at him. He looked at the long, terrible stretch of carpet between the coffee table and the armchair. He looked back at Vernon.

Then he let go of the table and walked.

Four steps. Five. Arms flung out on either side, like a man on a tightrope, his face screwed up in ferocious concentration. On the sixth he wobbled, and Petunia gasped, and Vernon lunged forward and caught him before he hit the carpet, and swung him up into the air.

"THAT'S IT! That's it! Did you see that? Did you see him?" Vernon was beaming all over his broad red face. "Six steps! Six! First go!"

Harry, upside down and astonished, began to laugh.

Mrs. Crimp, smiling broadly, wrote something down.

Petunia found out what it was three weeks later, when the report came in a brown envelope. She read it standing in the hall. Most of it was weights and measurements and boxes ticked. But at the bottom, in the space marked Other comments, Mrs. Crimp had written in round, careful handwriting:

Child well cared for. Strong attachment to both carers. Took first steps during visit, towards uncle. No concerns.

Petunia read the last two words several times.

Then she folded the report very small, and put it in the box in the airing cupboard, with the yellow blanket and the letter to Lily.

Vernon drove to Mothercare on Saturday and came back with a second car seat, a second highchair, and a small blue anorak with a duck-headed hood. He said it was on special offer. It was not.

"Vernon," said Petunia, holding up the anorak.

"It was on special offer," said Vernon firmly, and went to put up a shelf.

*   *   *

On the last Friday in November, Vernon left Grunnings at lunchtime and went to see Mr. Prendergast, the solicitor in the High Street, who had done the conveyancing on Number Four and drawn up Vernon's will.

"I'll need that changed," said Vernon, sitting down heavily in the leather chair.

Mr. Prendergast, a thin, precise man with a fountain pen and very small spectacles, took out the file. "Certainly, Mr. Dursley. What did you have in mind?"

"Where it says Dudley."

"Yes?"

"I want it to say Dudley and Harry."

Mr. Prendergast looked up over his spectacles. "Your nephew. Yes. I heard about the accident. I'm very sorry." He made a note. "Do you want to divide the estate in any particular way? It's quite usual, when there's a natural child and a— a ward, shall we say, for the natural child to—"

"Equal," said Vernon.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Equal. Half each. Down the middle. Same as if they were both mine." Vernon's ears had gone red. "And if anything happens to me and Petunia, they're to stay together. Both of them. Wherever they go. I want that in writing. I don't want anybody splitting them up."

Mr. Prendergast put his pen down.

"Mr. Dursley," he said, more gently than usual, "it's not always possible to guarantee that sort of thing. Guardianship can be complicated. But I can certainly put down your wishes very clearly."

"Then put them down very clearly."

"I shall."

Vernon sat back. He felt rather hot. He hadn't known he was going to say any of that until he heard himself saying it, and now that he had, it felt as solid and inevitable as a load-bearing wall.

On the way back to the car, he passed the building society. He stopped outside.

He stood on the pavement for a minute or two, looking at the posters in the window. Save for Their Future. The Little Saver Account. A smiling cartoon squirrel with an acorn.

He'd opened one for Dudley the week he was born. Five pounds a month, put in by standing order, every month without fail. For school, Vernon had said at the time. For Smeltings. He had been to Smeltings himself, and he was going to send his son there if it killed him.

He went in.

"I'd like to open a savings account," he told the girl at the counter. "For a child. Same sort as my son's."

"Of course, sir. Name of the child?"

Vernon took the pen she offered him. He stood at the counter and wrote it on the form in square, careful capitals. His hand wasn't quite steady, and the letters came out wobbly.

HARRY.

"Same amount as my son's," he said. "Every month."

"Lovely. And the account's in the name of Harry—"

"Potter," said Vernon. "Harry Potter."

The girl stamped the passbook. She gave it to him in a little plastic wallet, and Vernon put it in his inside pocket, next to the one that said DUDLEY. Then he went back to the office, sat down at his desk, did the sums on the back of an envelope, and realized that there was no possible way he could afford to send two boys to Smeltings on what he earned.

He looked at the sums for a long time.

Then he took the envelope, tore it into four, and threw it in the bin. He'd work it out. He had ten years.

That winter, for the first time, Vernon put his name down for overtime.

*   *   *

The old woman from Wisteria Walk turned up at the beginning of December.

Petunia had never seen her before. That was odd in itself, because Petunia had seen everybody. She knew every family within four streets, the names of their children, the makes of their cars, and the state of their back gardens. But one morning in the queue at the post office, there was a little stooped woman in a hairnet and a shapeless tweed coat with cat hairs all over it. Without being asked, she said, "Oh, you'll be Mrs. Dursley. With the two little boys."

"Yes," said Petunia warily.

"Arabella Figg. I've just taken the house on the corner of Wisteria Walk. Number Twelve. The one with the green door." The old woman peered into the double pushchair, where Dudley was asleep with his mouth open and Harry was wide awake, gazing back at her with his solemn green eyes. Something passed across the old woman's face. Petunia couldn't read it. It looked, for one strange second, almost like grief. "Oh, my," Mrs. Figg said softly. "Aren't you a little love."

"He's my nephew," said Petunia. "My sister passed away. A car accident."

"Yes. So I heard. I'm so sorry, dear." Mrs. Figg straightened up. "Well, if you're ever stuck, I'm only round the corner. Pop them over. I'm not much use for anything nowadays, but I can mind a baby or two. I've got a lot of cats, mind. Do they like cats?"

"I'm sure I couldn't say."

"You'll want to bring them round and find out."

Petunia did not bring them round. Not that week, nor the next. There was something about Mrs. Figg she couldn't put her finger on. How quickly she'd known Petunia's name. The way she'd looked at Harry. And her cats, of whom there turned out to be a great many, all with flat, clever faces and too much interest in the Dursleys' front garden. One of them sat on the wall of Number Four for nearly a whole afternoon, staring at the house, and Petunia went cold all over and drew every curtain before she remembered that it was only a cat.

Only a cat.

She remembered another cat on that wall, on another night, and drew the curtains tighter still.

But then, two weeks before Christmas, Vernon's firm had its dinner and dance at the Crown in Little Whinging, and the girl who usually babysat came down with tonsillitis. In the end, at six o'clock, Petunia found herself standing on the doorstep of Number Twelve, Wisteria Walk, with a baby on each hip and a bag of nappies over her shoulder.

The house smelled of cabbage and cats. Mrs. Figg opened the door in a pair of tartan carpet slippers and beamed.

"Oh, lovely. In you come. Mind Mr. Tibbles, he's under the mat."

When they came back at eleven, both boys were fast asleep in a nest of cushions in front of the gas fire, with four cats curled around them like hot-water bottles. Harry had his fist buried in the fur of a large gray one, and the cat was letting him.

"Good as gold," said Mrs. Figg. "The little dark one woke up once, about half past nine. Frightened of something. But Mr. Paws went and sat on him and he dropped right off again." She lowered her voice. "Ever such a serious little face, hasn't he? As though he's thinking about something."

Vernon, carrying Dudley out to the car, said that the place smelled like a tannery and that he wasn't sure about that woman.

Petunia, carrying Harry, said nothing. But she found that she'd stopped being frightened of the cats.

*   *   *

The letter hadn't mentioned other things, either.

It hadn't mentioned that Harry would wake every night at five past three, as though an alarm had gone off inside him, and scream as if the whole world were on fire. It hadn't mentioned that nothing would stop him. Not milk, not rocking, not the moon nightlight, not Petunia's quiet, desperate shushing. He screamed until he was hoarse, and then he whimpered, and somewhere in the whimpering there was a word that sounded like "Mama," and that was the worst part of all.

On the fifth night, Petunia sat on the floor of the small bedroom with the baby in her arms and cried silently with him because she didn't know what else to do.

Vernon appeared in the doorway in his pajamas.

He didn't say anything. He just reached down and took the baby out of her arms, clumsily, the way men hold things they're afraid of breaking. He tucked Harry against his big chest and started walking. Up and down the little room. Up and down the landing. Down the stairs and round the kitchen and up again. And as he walked, he began, very quietly and very badly, to sing.

It was the song about wheels on the bus. It was the only one he knew all the words to, because Dudley demanded it every morning in the garden. Vernon Dursley could not hold a tune. He sang it flat and out of time, and he got the verses in the wrong order, and he made up a new one about the drills on the bus that went round and round, because he'd forgotten the one about the wipers.

Harry stopped screaming.

He hiccuped. He sniffed. He turned his small, wet face into Vernon's pajama top, grabbed a fistful, and listened to the terrible singing with deep, solemn concentration. Somewhere around the fourth time through the bus song, he fell asleep.

Vernon kept walking for another twenty minutes anyway, just to be sure.

Petunia stood on the landing and watched him. She had been married to Vernon Dursley for four years. She thought she knew him inside and out, like the back of her own hand. Standing there at half past three in the morning, she found she had been wrong about one thing. She'd never known he could be like this.

"Don't," said Vernon, without turning round, as he walked past her for the thirtieth time. "Don't say anything, Petunia. I'm warning you."

She didn't. But she went downstairs, made him a cup of tea, and left it on the bedside table, and that was how it went from then on. Every night at five past three, for nearly four months, Vernon got up and walked the landing with Harry and sang about buses. Then one night in March, Harry slept straight through, and Vernon lay awake for an hour, waiting to be needed, almost sorry.

*   *   *

She didn't say Lily's name out loud for a month.

She thought it all the time. She thought it at the sink, and in the bath, and in the queue at the butcher's, and at five past three in the morning with Vernon's terrible singing drifting along the landing. But she didn't say it. Saying it would have made it real in a way the letter hadn't. She had spent so many years not saying it that she had forgotten how her mouth was supposed to go round it.

It came out by accident, in the end. Bath time, on a Thursday in December.

Dudley loved the bath. He would have lived in it, given the chance. Harry hated it. He screamed every time she lowered him into the water. He went stiff as a board and clung to the side and looked at her with an expression of the deepest betrayal, as though she had personally invented water to annoy him.

"Oh, honestly," said Petunia, kneeling on the bath mat with her sleeves rolled up. "You're just like your mother. She used to make exactly that face. Exactly that one. Mum used to say she'd have to—"

She stopped.

Harry stopped screaming, too. He looked up at her with wet, curious eyes, as though he'd heard something in her voice that he recognized.

Petunia sat back on her heels.

"Your mother," she said again, slowly, testing it. "Lily. Her name was Lily."

Harry splashed one hand in the water, experimentally.

"She hated baths," said Petunia. "Hated them. Until she was about four. Then one day she decided she loved them, and you couldn't get her out. Mum used to have to pull the plug out from under her. She'd sit there in the empty tub, singing, until she went blue." She swallowed. "She was a terrible singer, actually. Worse than your Uncle Vernon. Nobody believes that, but it's true."

Harry looked at her. Then he looked at the water. And then, very cautiously, he let go of the side of the bath with one hand, and splashed.

"Yes," said Petunia. "Just like that."

She went on talking while she washed him. She didn't decide to. It simply came out, the way water comes out when you take the plug out from under a tub. Lily on the swings. Lily with her hair in two plaits, and one always coming undone. Lily who cried at the end of every film, even the funny ones. Lily who had once cut Petunia's fringe in the garden shed and made it so short that their mother had to put Petunia in a hat for six weeks. Lily, who had been brave, and kind, and very annoying, and who had never once in her life done what she was told.

Harry listened to all of it with grave attention, and didn't scream again.

When she lifted him out and wrapped him in the towel, Petunia found that her face was wet, and it wasn't the bath.

"There," she said, rubbing his hair dry, so that it stood up in every direction at once. "There. That's your mother. I'll tell you more, another time. I'll tell you all of it." She hesitated. "Well. Most of it."

From that night on, she told him something about Lily every bath time. A small thing, always. Something true. Harry never cried at bath time again.

Dudley, who considered bath time his own business, eventually demanded stories too. So Petunia told him things about Lily as well, and that was how both boys grew up knowing that their Auntie Lily had been afraid of moths and brilliant at hopscotch, and had once been sick on a donkey at Skegness.

*   *   *

It was a week before Christmas when Vernon saw the rabbit move.

He was standing in the doorway of the small bedroom at a quarter past seven in the evening, in his slippers, with Harry's bottle in his hand. The baby was in his cot and supposed to be going to sleep. He wasn't. He was standing up holding the bars, glaring across the room at his favorite toy, a floppy knitted rabbit with one ear, which Dudley had thrown out of the cot at teatime and which had landed on top of the chest of drawers, a good six feet away.

Harry wanted the rabbit.

He made this clear. He stretched one small arm out between the bars towards it, as far as it would go, and made a noise that was half a grunt and half a wail. His face went red. His fingers opened and closed.

The rabbit slid to the edge of the chest of drawers.

Vernon blinked.

The rabbit slid off the edge of the chest of drawers. And it did not fall. It floated, as gently as a soap bubble, all the way across the bedroom. It stopped, quite politely, in the air just in front of the cot, and dropped into Harry's waiting hand.

Harry hugged it, lay down, put his thumb in his mouth, and closed his eyes.

Vernon stood in the doorway with the bottle in his hand for a full minute.

Then he walked very carefully into the room, put the bottle down on the chest of drawers, and walked very carefully out again. He went downstairs, into the living room, where Petunia was doing the ironing in front of the television.

"Pet," he said.

"Mm?"

He opened his mouth. He closed it again.

He thought about the teacups on the draining board in Cokeworth, washing themselves while Mrs. Evans put a tea towel over them. He thought about Lily laughing, sorry, sorry, I forget I'm not allowed at home. He thought about the box in his head marked NOT MY BUSINESS, and how very full it had got these last few weeks, and how the lid had started not to close properly.

"Vernon? What is it?"

He thought about Harry's face, red and determined, reaching for the one thing in the world he wanted.

"Draft," said Vernon. "In the small bedroom. There's a terrible draft in there. Blowing things about. I'll— I'll get some of that foam strip for the window. Tomorrow."

Petunia looked at him for a long moment over the ironing board.

"Yes," she said quietly. "You do that."

He fitted the foam strip the next morning. It took him an hour and a great deal of swearing, and it did not make the slightest difference. Over the next ten years, there would be a great many more drafts in Number Four, Privet Drive. And sudden gusts of wind. And a cat that must have got in somehow, and a pane of glass that must have been faulty, and a hairdresser who must have cut it shorter than she meant to. And Vernon Dursley had an explanation ready for every one of them, delivered with a perfectly straight face.

He never once told anyone what he had seen that night in the small bedroom.

But he did go back upstairs, much later, after Petunia had gone to bed. He stood in the doorway again and looked at the sleeping baby with the one-eared rabbit tucked under his chin.

"Well," he said, very softly, to nobody. "Well. Not much we can do about it, is there."

And he went to bed.

*   *   *

Vernon's sister Marge came for Sunday lunch on the twentieth of December, and stayed for four hours, and made her opinion known in each one of them.

Marge Dursley was a large, red-faced woman who bred bulldogs in the country and talked about them the way other people talked about their grandchildren. She arrived in a tweed coat that strained at the buttons and a cloud of dog, with a present for Dudley the size of a suitcase. She kissed Vernon on both cheeks, Petunia on neither, and swept straight past the second highchair without looking at it.

She looked at it during the soup.

"So that's the one, is it."

"That's Harry," said Petunia.

"Hm." Marge leaned back and examined him over her spoon, the way she might examine a puppy that had come out the wrong color. Harry, who had soup on his nose, examined her back. "Skinny little thing. Not much to him. Is he backward?"

"He's fifteen months old, Marge."

"Dudley's fifteen months old. Dudley's a fine, big boy. Aren't you, Duddy?" Dudley beamed and smeared parsnip in his hair. "Look at the size of him next to this one. You'd never think they were the same age."

Vernon cleared his throat. "They're different sorts of boys, that's all."

"I should think they are." Marge put her spoon down. "I'll say this once, Vernon, and then I'll say no more about it. You're a soft touch. You always were. Ever since you were six and brought home that three-legged cat. Look at this. You've got your own boy to think about, a good boy, and you go and take in your wife's sister's leftovers, from God knows where, and the father, from what I hear—"

"Marge," said Vernon.

"—never did a day's honest work in his life, by all accounts. And the two of them going and getting themselves killed and leaving you to pick up the bill. It's not right. I'm not saying it to be unkind. I'm saying it because somebody has to." She jabbed her spoon towards Harry. "It's all about the breeding. I've said it a hundred times. If there's something wrong with the bitch, there'll be something wrong with the pup. You mark my words. You'll be sorry."

The dining room went very quiet.

Petunia had gone white to the lips. She was holding her soup spoon in a grip that would have bent a lesser spoon. Dudley, who sensed that something interesting was happening, stopped eating and looked from one grown-up to another.

Harry sneezed soup across the tablecloth.

Vernon put down his napkin.

He did not shout. That was what Petunia remembered afterwards. In nearly five years she had heard Vernon Dursley shout at waiters, at traffic wardens, at the television, at men in Swindon, and once, memorably, at a duck. She had never, until that moment, heard him go quiet.

"He's staying, Marge," he said.

Marge blinked. "I didn't say—"

"You said plenty. And now I'll say something. He's staying. He's ours now. He lives here, with his family, and that's an end of it. You'll be civil to him in my house, or you'll not come to my house." He picked up his spoon again. His ears had gone a deep plum color, but his voice didn't change. "Now. Petunia's made a very nice roast. And we're going to eat it."

For a long moment, Marge looked at her brother as though she'd never seen him before.

Then she sniffed. "Well. Don't say I didn't warn you."

"I won't," said Vernon.

She didn't mention Harry again that day, though she watched him through the rest of lunch with narrowed eyes. When she left, she gave Dudley a smacking kiss and a five-pound note. She didn't give Harry anything at all. Petunia expected nothing different, and she was right. Every visit afterwards went the same way, for years. There was always a present for Dudley, always nothing for Harry, always the remarks about breeding.

But she never said it to Vernon's face again. Not like that. Not at his table.

That night, after Marge had gone, Petunia found Vernon in the kitchen, washing up, which he never did.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't know what you mean." He scrubbed hard at a roasting tin that was already clean. "She's my sister. I love her. She's a good woman, Marge, in her way. Salt of the earth." A pause. "But she's wrong about that boy."

Petunia picked up a tea towel and began to dry.

"Yes," she said. "She is."

*   *   *

On Christmas Eve, after both boys were asleep, they sat on the living-room floor and filled the stockings.

Vernon was in charge of the satsumas, the chocolate coins, and the small plastic tractors. Petunia was in charge of everything else, because Vernon couldn't be trusted not to put the chocolate at the top, where it would be found and eaten before seven. The fire had burned down to a red glow. The tree lights blinked on and off, on and off, in a pattern Vernon had spent forty minutes setting up and was very proud of.

"One more tractor each," said Vernon, "and that's your lot."

"They've each got two tractors already."

"Boys like tractors."

"They're fifteen months old, Vernon. They like the paper."

"Then they'll have tractors and paper." He tucked a red tractor into Harry's stocking and a blue one into Dudley's, then held both stockings up, side by side, comparing the bulges with the eye of an engineer. He moved a satsuma from one to the other. Then he moved it back. "There. Even."

Petunia smiled down at the ribbon she was curling with the blade of the scissors.

They worked for a while in comfortable silence. Outside, somebody's carol singers had reached the end of Privet Drive and were murdering "Good King Wenceslas."

"Pet," said Vernon eventually, without looking up.

"Mm."

"When he's older." He turned a chocolate coin over in his fingers. "The boy. What are we going to tell him?"

Petunia's scissors stopped.

"About his mum and dad," Vernon went on. "About how they— about what happened. He's going to ask. Kids always ask. And then there's the other business." He cleared his throat. "The draughts."

"I know."

"Because if he's like her. If he's one of them. Then sooner or later, they're going to come for him, aren't they? That school of hers. In Scotland." He said Scotland the way some people said the Moon. "They'll want him back."

"Yes," said Petunia quietly. "When he's eleven. They came for Lily when she was eleven. There was a letter."

Vernon was silent for a moment.

"Eleven," he said. "So that's ten years."

"Nearly."

"And till then?"

Petunia looked at the two stockings lying on the hearthrug. Red and lumpy and bulging with tractors.

"Till then," she said, "he's ours. He's just a boy. An ordinary boy, with an ordinary family, who goes to an ordinary school and has his tea at six and gets told off for his hair. Like Dudley." She took a breath. "And we'll tell him about his parents. That they died in a car crash, the same as we've told everybody else. And that they loved him. That part's true. That's all he needs, for now. And when the letter comes—"

"If it comes."

"When it comes," said Petunia, "we'll tell him the rest. All of it. Everything I know." She put the scissors down. "I'm not going to lie to him about what he is, Vernon. I won't. My parents never lied to Lily. They lied to me. They told me I was special too, and I wasn't, and I found out on a railway platform when I was thirteen." Her voice shook, only a little. "I won't have him finding out like that. I won't."

Vernon didn't answer for a long time.

Then he reached across and put a chocolate coin into her hand. It was a gold one. He always saved the gold ones for her.

"All right," he said. "When it comes, then."

"Thank you."

"But he's going to Smeltings first," said Vernon. "If he wants to. I've opened the account. If he'd rather go to Smeltings than to some castle full of— of whatever they've got, then that's up to him, and nobody's going to make him."

"Vernon," said Petunia, "you don't even know what they've got."

"Don't need to." He stood, and his knees cracked, and he hung both stockings on the hooks above the fire, side by side, adjusting them until they hung exactly level. "Whatever it is, I'm against it."

Petunia laughed. She didn't often. It surprised them both.

She sat on the floor in front of the fire with the gold coin in her hand and watched him fuss with the stockings. Then she looked up at the ceiling, where, through the plaster and the floorboards, two little boys were asleep in two little rooms. And for the first time since the second of November, she let herself think that it might, just possibly, be all right.

*   *   *

That first Christmas, two stockings hung on the mantelpiece.

Petunia sewed the second one herself from an old red skirt because the shops had sold out of the good ones. She stitched HARRY across the top in white wool. Her stitches were small and precise and nearly perfect. Only the second R was the tiniest bit crooked, because her eyes had gone blurry halfway through it and she'd had to stop.

On Christmas morning, Dudley emptied both stockings onto the carpet in thirty seconds flat and had to be persuaded at length that half the satsumas belonged to his cousin. Harry, not quite eighteen months old, ate a piece of wrapping paper and threw up on Vernon's slippers.

Christmas dinner was turkey, and too many sprouts, and a pudding that Vernon set alight with so much brandy that the flames nearly reached the lampshade. Dudley shrieked with delight. Harry watched the blue fire with wide, interested eyes, without the least sign of fright, and Petunia, who had been holding her breath, let it out slowly.

Not fire, then. Only green.

They pulled crackers. Vernon wore his paper crown all afternoon and read out every joke twice, and laughed at all of them twice, even the one about the penguin that nobody understood. Mrs. Figg had pushed a card through the door on Christmas Eve, with a robin on the front and a wobbly drawing of a cat inside, addressed To Mr. & Mrs. Dursley, Dudley, and Harry. It was the first card that had ever come to that house with his name on it. Petunia stood it on the mantelpiece, in the middle.

In the afternoon, Vernon fell asleep in his armchair with his crown over one eye. The boys sat on the rug, surrounded by wrapping paper, playing a game whose rules seemed to involve Dudley taking every toy Harry picked up and Harry letting him, cheerfully, and then picking up another.

Then, out of nowhere, Dudley took Harry's new wooden bus, the one with the wheels that really went round, and Harry did not let him.

He held on. They tugged. Dudley's face went red and his lower lip came out, and Petunia was already getting up to stop it when Harry, still holding grimly on to his end of the bus, looked across the room at the man asleep in the armchair and said, very clearly:

"Bus."

Vernon woke up with a snort. "Wassat?"

"Bus," said Harry again, louder, and pointed at him, as if this explained everything. "Bus. Bus."

Petunia sat down very slowly on the arm of the sofa.

It was the first word he had said since he came to them. In nearly eight weeks of screaming and hiccuping and solemn staring, he hadn't said anything at all. Only, in the very worst hours of the night, that other word, the one he called out into the dark for someone who wasn't coming.

And now, of everything in the world, he had picked bus.

He wasn't talking about the toy. Everyone in the room understood that. He was looking straight at Vernon. Bus was the song in the dark. Bus was the big chest and the terrible singing and the walking up and down. Bus was the person who came.

Vernon looked at him for a long moment, his paper crown slipping down over his ear.

"Well," he said, in a funny voice. "Well. That's me, then, is it. That's my name now."

"Bus," Harry agreed, and let go of the toy so suddenly that Dudley fell over backward into the wrapping paper and started to laugh.

Vernon didn't say anything else. He just got up, quite slowly, and went into the kitchen, and was gone for some time. When he came back, his eyes were red. He said the sprouts must have disagreed with him, and he had his camera in his hand.

"Right," he said thickly. "Both of you. Under the tree. Hats on. Look at Daddy. Look at— look at Bus. That's it. That's it. Smile."

Vernon photographed both boys under the tree in their paper hats. He had it developed at Boots, bought a frame, and put it on the living room mantelpiece.

It was the first photograph of Harry in that house. It was very far from the last.