The door clicked shut behind her and the silence that followed felt deliberate. No hum of her voice, no soft scrape of her bare feet on the floorboards, no faint sweetness of her tea curling through the air. Just stillness. The kind that presses at your ribs until you have to breathe differently.
Theo stood where she had left him, back against the door, palms flat against the wood as though he could feel the echo of her departure through it. His pulse still hadn't settled. The kiss had been no more than a brush of warmth, but it had landed like an alarm spell. He could feel the imprint of it now, ridiculous and vivid, as if the skin there had learned a new language.
He closed his eyes and let out a slow breath that turned into something closer to a groan. "Every day," he said, barely audible. He opened one eye, staring into the dimness of his hallway as if it had witnessed the crime. "Every bloody day."
He pushed himself off the door and began pacing, barefoot, his socks whispering against the polished floor. The motion was restless, almost theatrical. "You complete fool," he muttered, raking a hand through his hair until it stuck up in stubborn directions. "Of all the lines available to you, you chose that one. You could have said thank you, lovely to see you, do take care. But no. You invite the embodiment of chaos to move in. Splendid. Inspired."
He threw an arm towards the nearest wall in exasperation, the sleeve of his robe falling open as he turned sharply on his heel. "You have truly outdone yourself, Theodore Nott. The ministry should grant medals for acts of idiocy this profound."
His voice bounced off the bare walls and back to him, making the silence louder. The books that lined the sitting room seemed to watch from their perfect order, their leather spines gleaming with the smug serenity of things untouched by emotional catastrophe.
"She won't take it seriously," he told them, as though their agreement mattered. "She can't possibly. She'll laugh about it. Forget it. Tell Granger that I have lost what little sense I had left."
He stopped pacing and pressed his thumb against the bridge of his nose, exhaling hard through his mouth. "Because who in their right mind would come back to this every single day?" His hand swept out, taking in the immaculate rows of books, the spotless table, the symmetrical cushions. "No one."
The word hung in the air, and something inside him shifted in quiet argument. He looked around again. It was all perfect. Everything exactly where it should be. Not a single item out of place. He had built his solitude like architecture. Every shelf, every ritual, every small, silent corner had been designed to keep the world out.
"Unless she does," he muttered, lowering his hand. The thought hit like a hex. "Unless she meant it."
He froze halfway across the room. His mind conjured the image with cruel efficiency: Luna standing at his door again, sunlight at her back, basket on her hip, smiling as though she had simply never left. He could hear her voice, calm, certain, impossible to refuse. Fine by me.
"Oh, for Merlin's sake," he said aloud, striding towards the kitchen as if movement might drown it out. He filled the kettle, then immediately realised he didn't want tea, but the sound of it boiling offered something to focus on. He watched the water begin to quiver, his jaw tight.
"I am not cut out for this," he told the kettle. "I am not built for domestic invasion. I have a schedule. A system. A perfectly respectable degree of emotional isolation. People call that stability."
The kettle whistled at him with what felt like judgement.
He poured the water anyway, muttering under his breath, and took a mouthful far too quickly. The scald caught his tongue and he swore violently, the cup clattering against the counter.
"Excellent," he said through gritted teeth. "Self-immolation before noon. A fitting continuation of the theme."
He started pacing again, mug in hand, speaking to the empty room as if it were a particularly unimpressed audience. "Hermione will find out. She always does. She'll arrive with that insufferable look of triumph and say she told me so. Draco will smirk like a cat in a creamery, make some comment about me finally embracing domesticity, and I'll be forced to hex him. Which will create paperwork. Which will lead to more questions about my social life, which is frankly nobody's business. And then I'll have to hex Hermione too, and then I'll be drinking alone in Azkaban. A dignified end."
He stopped beside the window, staring out at the city spread beneath him. London looked unbothered. Trains moved. Owls crossed the rooftops. Somewhere below, people were buying sandwiches and pretending life made sense. He pressed his forehead to the cool glass and let the silence crawl back in.
"She won't come back," he said quietly. "It was politeness. A farewell gesture. Fine by me could mean anything." He paused, brow furrowing. "It could mean nothing."
But his chest didn't believe it. The echo of her laughter still seemed to hum faintly in the room, stitched into the air. The faint scent of the tea she'd brewed lingered stubbornly in the kitchen, floral and calm. Her voice replayed in his head with cruel precision: Every day.
He turned from the window and looked around, seeing the flat properly for the first time in months. The precision of it felt suddenly severe, as if all the order had sucked the air out of the space.
"This is why people own cushions," he muttered. "And curtains. And possibly souls."
He set the mug down on the table, sank into the armchair, and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. The pulse behind them beat like a clock he couldn't stop.
"I am doomed," he said flatly, then dropped his hands and stared at the ceiling. "Absolutely doomed."
A soft breeze from the enchanted window rustled the papers on his desk, shifting one page just enough for it to flutter loose and land at his feet. He looked down. It was a rough sketch from his last project, lines blurred by the smudge of an ink-stained thumbprint. For some reason, the sight of it made his throat tighten.
He picked it up and smoothed the crease. "I am not lonely," he said to no one, the words too loud in the stillness. "I am organised."
It sounded feeble even to him.
The quiet returned, heavier now, filled with the ghosts of her laughter and the memory of her touch. He leaned back, eyes closing against it, and gave in to the smallest, most reluctant smile.
"Every day," he repeated softly, tasting the words as though they might dissolve. "You really might, mightn't you."
The thought should have terrified him. Instead, to his dismay, it didn't.
He stayed there for a long time, listening to the quiet, waiting for his heart to steady and his reason to return. Neither did.
The knock of wings against glass tore through the silence like a misplaced thought. Theo jerked upright, the book sliding from his lap and thudding softly to the floor. The sound came again, a rapid tapping, insistent and somehow accusatory.
He turned toward the window. There, half-blurred by the dim light, an owl sat perched on the sill, feathers ruffled, amber eyes glowing like two small lanterns of disapproval. It tapped once more, harder this time, as if to say you are being deliberately slow.
Theo rubbed a hand over his face. "Oh, brilliant. Another intrusion." He rose, joints protesting, and crossed the room with the reluctant gait of a man heading to his own execution. When he unlatched the window, a rush of cold air swept in, sharp with the smell of winter and smoke. The owl hopped inside as though it owned the place, scattering a few stray droplets of rain onto the counter.
"Do come in," Theo muttered. "Make yourself comfortable. Perhaps tear apart the curtains while you're at it."
The owl hooted once, unamused, and stuck out its leg.
Theo untied the note, fingers clumsy with sleep and irritation. "If this is another bill," he warned, "I am setting fire to the entire building. I mean it this time."
The parchment unfurled in his hands, smooth and expensive, the handwriting immediately recognisable. Precise. Self-satisfied. Infuriating. He read.
I hear you and Luna had lunch. I am proud. Try not to ruin it.
Hermione.
Theo stared at the words for several long seconds, expression blank, before his mouth fell open. His heartbeat thudded somewhere behind his ribs, quick and incredulous.
"How," he said aloud, the word thin and stretched. "How does she know already."
He looked around the flat as if it might offer answers. "Did she follow her? Did she bribe the owl network? Is there a secret Ministry department dedicated to tracking my humiliation?"
The owl tilted its head.
Theo glared at it. "Don't look at me like that. I wouldn't put it past her. She has people everywhere. She has connections. She probably hexed my teapot to gossip."
The owl hooted, low and unimpressed.
"Don't defend her," he said sharply. "You're all in league together."
He read the letter again, slower this time, as if the words might change. Try not to ruin it. A masterpiece of condescension in five syllables.
"Try not to ruin it," he repeated, mocking her tone. "As if that is not precisely what I do. As if ruin is not my natural state. She might as well have written 'good luck breathing correctly, you hopeless bastard.'"
The owl fluffed its feathers in what looked suspiciously like agreement.
Theo's eyes narrowed. "Outrageous."
He crossed the room in quick, determined strides and came to a halt before the fireplace. "You are insufferable, Maine," he muttered under his breath, still using the nickname he'd sworn to abandon years ago. "Smug, sanctimonious, intolerable."
He tossed the letter into the flames. The parchment curled instantly, edges blackening before folding in on themselves like wounded petals. The handwriting flared bright for a second before vanishing into ash.
Theo watched it burn. Watched until the fire calmed and the last fragment of Hermione's perfect ink disappeared. Then he exhaled, sharp and shaky, as though he'd just exorcised something.
"That is that," he said quietly. "Problem solved. No further interference."
The owl hooted again from the counter, expectant.
Theo turned on it. "No. Absolutely not. You can take your smug expression and your ridiculous feathers elsewhere. I am not dictating a reply."
It blinked, unmoved.
"Do not test me," he warned. "She will take silence as consent, as she always does. And then she will feel justified in meddling further. No. No letters. No answers. If she wants an update she can break in herself, and then I shall duel her in the sitting room and make headlines in the Daily Prophet. That would at least be dignified."
The owl clicked its beak, unimpressed, and launched itself back toward the open window, wings cutting through the quiet. A few loose feathers drifted to the floor as it vanished into the dark.
Theo stood there, the fire crackling softly behind him, his shoulders slowly dropping from their rigid set. The room was silent again, save for the faint ticking of the clock on the mantel. The moment stretched, thin and heavy.
He looked down at the hearth. A small heap of ash sat glowing faintly in the embers, stubbornly refusing to cool.
"Excellent," he said to no one. "Now even my fire judges me."
He turned away and crossed back to the armchair, lowering himself into it with the air of a man accepting defeat. The room looked exactly as it had before she'd come—tidy, symmetrical, perfectly in order—but something in the air had shifted. It was as though she'd left a fingerprint on the silence itself.
On the table beside him sat the napkin she had folded, still there from lunch. A perfect white square, edges sharp, corners aligned. It should have looked sterile. Instead, it looked like an offering, quiet and deliberate, as if she had meant to leave proof that she had been real.
Theo stared at it for a long time. "Every day," he murmured, testing the shape of the words again. They landed differently now, not like a threat or a promise, but something stranger. A bruise pressed just to see if it still hurt.
He leaned back, the chair creaking under his weight, and closed his eyes. The warmth from the fire reached him in uneven waves, the faint scent of her tea still clinging to the air like the aftertaste of a dream.
He could see it again—the way she had smiled at him when she left, that calm, maddening certainty, as though she'd already decided something on his behalf. He had never met anyone who moved through the world like that.
"She'll come back," he said under his breath, the realisation arriving like a confession. "She actually will."
The thought made his chest ache.
He pressed his palms to his face, dragging them down until they rested at his jaw. "Every day," he repeated, softer now. "What in God's name am I supposed to do with that."
The fire popped quietly, scattering a few embers onto the grate. He watched them fade. The flat was still spotless, still orderly, still his, and yet for the first time it felt uncomfortably small.
He sat there for what felt like hours, though the clock had only ticked a few minutes forward. The light dimmed, the shadows deepened, and the ache in his chest grew quieter but no less present.
When he finally spoke again, it wasn't to the room or to the ghosts of her laughter or to the ashes cooling in the fireplace. It was simply to himself, in a voice too tired to lie.
"I am not built for this," he said, eyes half-closed. "But I think she knows that."
He let the words hang in the air until the silence accepted them. Then, almost without thinking, he reached for the folded napkin on the table and smoothed its edge with his thumb.
"Every day," he whispered one last time, as though the phrase itself might keep the room from falling apart.
He tipped his head back, eyes closing against the flicker of the fire, and let the thought linger because it was easier than pretending he didn't want it to come true.
⋆.˚🦋༘⋆
He slept through the first alarm because he did not own one. If he had, he might have thrown it at the wall. He slept through the second because the sun, relentless and smug, did not care about his need for penance and sent a slow warm tide across his pillow that felt deceptively kind, as if it too were mocking him. The light crept up his arm, soft and patient, until it reached his face and made him flinch.
When he finally surfaced from the half-dreaming fog of sleep, he did not move. He lay flat on his back, the sheets twisted around one ankle, the pillow folded into a shape that had once been comfortable. The air in the room was still, faintly cool, and carried that quiet, domestic scent of linen and dust that belongs only to spaces that have not yet decided to wake up.
He listened. Not for noise exactly, but for proof that the world had continued without him. Somewhere, a pipe clicked. A neighbour's kettle whistled faintly through the wall. The rest was silence—the heavy sort that makes you aware of your own breathing. He stared at the ceiling until it blurred, half-hoping it might offer answers it did not have.
The ache behind his eyes pulsed, a dull and familiar rhythm, the kind of headache that felt earned. His tongue was dry. His throat tasted faintly of old tea and lemon sugar. There was a ghost of warmth pressed into his cheek, a memory that refused to fade. He lifted his hand, fingertips brushing the place where her lips had been. The skin there tingled faintly, as if it still remembered her. He pressed harder, then sighed and dropped his hand, muttering, "Ridiculous."
He rolled onto his side and caught sight of the clock on the mantel. Ten past ten. Too late for excuses, too early for purpose. He told himself coffee would fix it, as coffee always did. It would sharpen his thoughts, unknot the edges of his mind, give his limbs a reason to behave. But coffee, he reminded himself grimly, only fixed the parts of him that needed to stand upright. It did nothing for the parts that could not forget the quiet way she had said fine by me, or the impossible calm with which she had agreed to every day.
He lay there a little longer, staring at the ceiling again, until the guilt of inaction outweighed the comfort of stillness. When he finally moved, it was with the grace of a condemned man. He sat on the edge of the bed, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and exhaled as though the simple act might realign his soul.
The floor was cold under his feet. His dressing gown hung on the back of the chair, accusing him of laziness. He ignored it, found the bathroom by habit, and turned the tap. The water came out colder than expected, biting enough to make him swear under his breath. He splashed his face until his skin stung and his thoughts cleared just enough to remember who he was supposed to be.
The mirror offered no comfort. He looked like a confession someone had tried to erase. His eyes were rimmed red, his hair an unsolvable equation, his mouth fixed in the half-sneer he wore when uncertain. He studied his reflection as though it might offer forgiveness. It didn't. He muttered, "You'll shave when you earn it," and turned away.
The kitchen greeted him like a room that had survived an invasion. Not destroyed, not ruined, just altered. There was evidence of another presence—faint, almost invisible—but once seen, impossible to ignore. The folded napkin she had left on the counter sat like a signature. The faint ring on the table where her teacup had rested caught the light. The small paper bag still perched beside the sink, holding the last corner of a lemon square he had promised himself he'd eat later. He hadn't. Later had not come.
He stared at the lemon square for longer than he should have, its neat yellow crumb looking absurdly innocent. "You," he muttered to it, "are part of the problem." Then he filled the kettle.
The grind of the coffee beans filled the silence. The steady rhythm of it, sharp and familiar, felt like control. He ground them too fine, poured too much water, and pretended the ritual was an act of discipline rather than desperation. When the first scent of bitterness rose through the air, something in him loosened. He set the cup down carefully, watching the steam curl upward until it thinned and disappeared.
He sat. Drank. Winced. Drank again. The second swallow went down easier, or perhaps he simply stopped caring. The coffee was hot, dark, and merciless, the way he liked it.
He told himself, as he did every morning, that work would fix everything. He would sort his notes. Rework the calculations that had refused to obey logic yesterday. Brew the potions he had promised himself would behave today. He would take a walk at dusk, let the air clear his head, and return to a flat that was quiet, obedient, exactly as he had trained it to be.
The plan was sound. It had always been sound. It was what kept the world in line.
He was rehearsing it in his head—each step a small promise of order—when someone knocked.
It was not a tentative knock. It was not the urgent, businesslike knock of a colleague or the polite double-tap of a delivery owl tapping at the glass. It was firm, unhurried, and carried the kind of rhythm that suggested certainty.
He froze. The cup paused halfway to his lips. The silence after the sound stretched long enough for him to imagine it might have been nothing.
Then it came again. Three measured knocks. Confident. Expectant.
It sounded like a person who believed they would be welcomed.
He closed his eyes for one helpless second and tried to bargain with reality. There were, he told himself, at least seven plausible ways to avoid this situation entirely. He could stay perfectly still and wait them out. He could feign illness, or death, or sudden combustion. He could scribble a note claiming urgent Ministry business and slip it under the door.
He considered all of them with grave sincerity. And yet none seemed to satisfy the part of him that had already moved, the same foolish part that had made promises over tea and lemon squares and thought them harmless.
By the time he reached the hallway, his pulse had decided for him. He opened the door a careful distance, just enough to see.
Luna stood on the threshold with the same basket, a new scarf wrapped round her hair in pale green, and a small plant in a chipped clay pot that looked like something that had been forgotten on a windowsill and loved anyway. The kind of thing that should not have survived but did. She smiled with that easy, unstudied warmth that made people relax without quite realising it. He did not relax.
He hesitated for a fraction of a second too long before stepping aside, half-aware that she would interpret hesitation as invitation anyway. She slipped past him, carrying her basket as if this were her house and he were the one visiting. He managed a strangled, "Morning," and immediately wondered why his voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.
"I brought a lighter tea today," she said over her shoulder, unbothered by his awkwardness. "Something with mint and a bit of honey. You look as if your head and your body haven't quite forgiven each other."
"That is… accurate," he admitted, though he hadn't meant to be honest. He winced at himself, then gestured vaguely toward the kitchen. "You remember where everything is."
"I do," she said, already halfway there. She set the basket on the counter, unwrapped the scarf from her neck, and began unpacking the contents with a sort of slow, deliberate tenderness that made the whole act feel like ritual.
First, a tin of loose leaves that gave off a faint cool scent when she opened it. Then a small jar with a note tied round the neck that read honey from a friend near a river in her looping hand. A square of soft linen came next, which she spread across the counter so the teapot would not scald the wood.
He leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, watching her. She moved through his kitchen as though she had always known where to place things, her gestures quiet but certain. It was unnerving. She filled the space the way light fills a room in the morning, not sudden, just steady.
He cleared his throat. "You came," he said finally, though the words sounded foolish the moment they left him.
"You asked me to," she replied simply, glancing up at him with the faintest hint of a smile. She might as well have said of course.
He had half a dozen things he wanted to say to that, all of them unsuited to daylight. He could have told her that people did not usually take his invitations seriously, that most of his sentences were defensive constructions designed to ward off precisely this—company, kindness, presence. He could have told her that he had built his life like a fortress and that she had waltzed through the gate without a single spell breaking. But she did not ask, and he was not brave enough to tell her.
Instead, he turned to the kettle, busying himself with the mechanical steps of hospitality, pretending the sound of water filling metal was the loudest thing in the room.
She crouched to set the little plant near the window. The pot wobbled slightly as she adjusted it, and she steadied it with a fingertip before turning it once, slow and deliberate. Then she stepped back, satisfied, and brushed her palms together lightly. "There," she said, almost to herself. "It wanted that light."
He followed her gaze. The plant was a frail-looking thing, all thin stems and hopeful leaves, but it did seem to catch the pale sun as if grateful. She glanced at the line of potted herbs and clipped specimens he kept by the sill, his tidy row of controlled greenery.
"Yours are very disciplined," she said, smiling. "They must be relieved."
He frowned faintly. "Relieved from what?"
"From having to behave all the time," she said, her tone as matter-of-fact as if she were discussing the weather. She reached toward one of his vines and lifted it with the gentlest touch, tickling the leaf with her fingertip before letting it fall back into place. "They'll have company now. Someone to teach them it's fine to grow sideways."
He didn't know what to do with that, or with the small pulse of warmth it left in his chest. So he turned toward the table instead, muttering, "I'm not sure plants have strong opinions about decorum."
"They do," she said serenely, pouring the water into the teapot. "They just express them slowly."
He wanted to roll his eyes but found himself smiling instead.
She caught the expression, of course. She always did. "See?" she said, turning to face him. "Already working."
He ignored the comment and busied himself with gathering stray sheets of parchment, shuffling them into a neat stack, as though the sudden need for order might disguise the way his thoughts had gone slightly off their axis. His fingers brushed against his notes—half-finished equations, fragments of potion recipes—and he realised that the words written there made less sense to him now than they had before she arrived.
"You needn't tidy on my account," she said, still watching him. "I'm not here to judge."
"I'm aware," he said quickly, stacking another pile anyway.
"Good," she said, as if he had passed a test. She turned back to the counter, poured the tea into two mugs, and placed them on the table. "You can sit, you know."
He hesitated, halfway between the comfort of standing and the surrender of sitting. "You're very confident in other people's furniture," he said.
"I'm confident in gravity," she said mildly. "It works the same in every house."
He sat, because not doing so would have felt childish. She handed him a mug and smiled at the faint tremor in his fingers as he accepted it.
"Drink," she said. "You look like you need rescuing."
"From what?"
"From yourself," she said, without missing a beat.
He took a sip to avoid answering, the mint cutting clean through the fog of his head. It was too easy, this rhythm between them, and far too dangerous.
She leaned against the counter, studying the plants again. "See, they're already happier. Look at the leaves. You should talk to them more."
"I prefer my conversations to answer back," he said dryly.
"They do," she said. "Just not in your language."
He sighed, leaning back in his chair, his lips quirking despite himself. "You're impossible."
She looked over her shoulder, eyes bright. "And you invited me."
He had no retort for that. Not one that wouldn't make him sound hopelessly besotted. So he stared into his tea and said, quietly, "Apparently so."
The sound of the kettle settling, the faint rustle of leaves at the window, her soft humming—all of it filled the air in a way that made the room feel alive. His flat had never been loud, but it had also never been this kind of quiet before—the living kind.
She moved through it like someone who belonged, and he, for once, did not feel the need to ask her to leave.
She drifted along the shelves, humming a piece of something unfamiliar, and pulled out a thin volume he had not realized he had left out of place. She opened to the middle, smiled as if the page had made a sound, and set the book down without comment as if to say later, when you are ready, we can talk about this.
She watered his plants without asking where the jug was kept. She found it on the second try and carried it with both hands the way a person carries a sleeping child. She tipped just enough toward each pot, not more, not less, and by the time she had finished the room smelled like damp earth and mint steam, and his headache had stepped back a pace.
"You are making yourself very at home," he said, in a tone that was supposed to be disapproving and sounded something else.
"I am visiting you every day," she said, not looking up from a tiny succulent that she had decided needed to be turned. "If I sit in the middle of the floor and refuse to move, that will be less helpful."
"You could also choose not to come," he said, because pride will always try at least once more.
"I could," she said, and she finally met his eyes, and something quiet there reminded him that choice is another word for attention given on purpose. "I do not want to choose that."
He found that he had no answer that did not betray him, so he busied himself with cups. He did not own two of the same size that felt worthy of guests because he did not have guests, so he selected the least offensive mismatched pair and told himself it looked charming. She smiled when he set them down, as if she had heard him scolding himself from across the room.
They drank in a quiet that did not accuse. He asked after her work because it seemed a safe harbour, and she told him about a woman who wove charms into cloth so that grief would not chafe as badly against skin.
He told her, in return, about a problem with stabilising a volatile base that refused to marry the way theory promised, and she asked two questions that swung the door open on a solution that had been sitting beside him for a week. He did not leap up and brew anything. He nodded slowly and said he would try it later, as if the late afternoon had already been set aside for that, and maybe it had been.
She wandered to his desk and read a few lines from a note he had tucked under a weight, and when she glanced back at him, he looked away. There was nothing incriminating on that page. It only held a half thought about the way a binding agent seems to respond to the temperature of a brewer's hands. Still he felt as if she had seen him with the lights up.
She stayed for just under two hours. It might have been a lifetime. She left behind the honey by accident or by design, a scarf he noticed only when he went to rinse the cups, and the little plant on the sill that had already turned its face toward the place where the afternoon would be.
When the door closed he stood very still and told himself tomorrow he would set a boundary.
Tomorrow he would explain that work demanded solitude, that rhythm had kept him alive, that honesty requires limits. He nodded once, to no one, the way a man nods when he thinks he has made a decision, then went to the window and touched the leaf of the new plant as if it might have a different texture from the others.
It did not. It felt like a leaf, alive and busy, and he drew his hand back as if he had been caught.
He worked late and discovered that the adjustment she had suggested with a few gentle words cut an hour of struggle into twenty minutes of flow. He told himself that was coincidence. He wrote three pages without needing to change a paragraph. He told himself he was due a stretch of clarity. He ate the last of the lemon square while standing at the counter, and it tasted like a small victory he had not earned.
He slept badly. He woke three times and listened, once to a passing car, once to the building settling, once to the soft memory of laughter that was not in the room. Each time he turned the pillow, found the cool side, and told himself to stop behaving like a boy in a school corridor with a handful of letters he would not send.
He rose earlier than usual and shaved with the care of a person who has decided to be respectable for something he will claim is unrelated. He put on a shirt he usually saved for meetings and told himself he had laundry scheduled anyway.
He made coffee and did not drink it as quickly. He put the scarf he had found over the back of a chair in case she asked after it, then moved it to the arm of the sofa where she had sat, then returned it to the chair because the movement made him feel as if he had announced something to the room.
He did not have to wonder if she would come. He had pretended to wonder all morning, speaking the lie to his reflection so that his face would remember how to look surprised. When the knock came it walked in through his chest before it reached the door.
He opened it and she held up a paper bag with a triumphant little look that said she had orchestrated a small festival. "Bagels," she said. "I am told they are a breakfast that equals courage."
"I do not require courage to eat," he said, taking the bag and breathing in a smell that made his stomach remember he had been a fool about breakfast for years.
"You require courage to enjoy yourself," she said, stepping past him. "We will practise."
She set a jar of something pink on the table that turned out to be a spread made with beets and garlic, and another with something that looked like clouds and tasted like her hint of lemon whipped into cream cheese.
He watched her cut one bagel in half with perfect indifference to the fact that his knife set was arranged by size and sharpened in a specific order and might collapse into anarchy if used without respect, and then he watched her put the pieces back together into a sandwich as if she were solving a puzzle that wanted to be solved.
"You keep looking at me like I am committing a crime," she said, handing him the plate.
"You are committing two," he said, but he sat and ate and found that the first bite made some old locked door in him give a friendly sigh.
She watered the little plant she had brought yesterday with a thimble of water, as if it were a bird that needed small sips.
She moved two of his books and then moved them back because she had changed her mind and did not want to upset his house for nothing.
She asked if she might put the scarf on while she made tea because the window had a small draft, and he told her he would fix the draft by evening, which was the first time he had looked beyond the hour to plan for her comfort without stopping to argue with himself about what that meant.
She told him a story about a stray cat that had moved into a neighbor's porch without ever once admitting it had chosen a family.
He told her a story about a professor who had insisted the best way to teach patience was to make a class of clever people watch sugar refuse to caramelise, and how half of them learned to breathe and the other half pretended not to cry.
They laughed at the right places and did not hurry through the pauses, and when she reached for the honey he was already moving the jar toward her hand.
He tried once to say the thing he had promised himself he would say. He cleared his throat at the sink and told her that he had been thinking about the shape of this arrangement. The word arrangement made him sound like a solicitor in an office full of heavy files. He felt himself harden into that shape and hated it. She turned with the kettle and waited him out with patience, and he found that he could not tell her she should come less often, not when her face had become the way his flat knew what time it was.
"Do you have work today," he said instead, and he saw the little smile that meant she had watched him change the subject and had decided to let him.
"I do," she said. "I have to deliver a charm that keeps pictures from falling off the wall when the building shivers. Some houses do that when a storm looks at them."
"Do you still talk to your house," he asked, and the question did not sound like a sneer the way it might have years ago. It sounded like a man who wanted to know the weather inside her rooms.
"I listen more than I talk," she said. "If you listen to a place long enough it will tell you where it hurts."
He glanced around his own rooms and pretended he was neither relieved nor afraid that she might have done that here already.
She stayed long enough to make him forget to guard his mouth. He heard himself telling her about a time he had nearly given up the work because the work had started to feel like a rehearsal of the same argument with a different flavor each week. She told him about walking at night because it made morning feel like a gift rather than a demand. He did not notice when the last bagel disappeared. He only noticed the way she placed the knife at a particular angle on the plate as if even this little thing should be thanked for service.
When she left he stood with his hand on the door and counted to ten before turning away. He told himself tomorrow he would put an end to it. He told himself that while he folded the tea cloth with an attention that looked like prayer. He told himself that while he took the scarf and hung it on a hook by the door because he had finally admitted to himself it belonged on a hook because it would be used again.
He tried to work until the light went thin and he had to turn on the lamp, and the notes came but slowly, as if they did not want to be alone with him again. He paced once for three minutes like a person trying to wear ruts in the floor that could count as paths. He stopped and laughed at himself because laughter had become a thing the flat made without needing permission.
He fell asleep earlier than he expected and dreamed without knives for the first time in a month. He woke before his body was ready because morning had brought a nervousness that felt a little like hope misfiled under the wrong name. He showered even though he usually did not in the morning, dressed as if he had somewhere to be, and then remembered that where he had to be was here, waiting for a knock that had already rewritten the way hours pass.
She came a little later than before. He had almost convinced himself that she had decided against it when the sound finally arrived, and relief hit him so hard that he had to pretend he had been on his way to the door for a different reason.
She came with a canvas tote that said support your local bee and he claimed that he did and she told him bees do not accept compliments as currency and he agreed to buy honey from her friend in a proper jar next time.
She did not ask to water the plants. She looked at them and then looked at him, and he nodded because the nod felt like a good morning.
She moved to the bookshelf and pulled a title he had not touched in years, a collection of essays by a man who had loved the world so fiercely that he wore himself thin trying to name every beautiful thing.
She read one paragraph aloud and stopped because her voice had changed on a particular sentence, and he knew enough about restraint to pour tea and let the quiet hold what she had not said.
Hermione's owl arrived while they were washing cups, and he nearly shut the window on the bird's face. Luna reached past him without comment, took the note, and handed it over as if the exchange had not been a near murder.
He unrolled the parchment with the grimness of a man reading a bill and found only four words written in a hand that was smug even when it tried not to be. keep going, you idiot.
He made a noise that did not belong to any language he spoke and walked the note to the fire. Luna took it back from his fingers before he could slide it into the flame and tucked it under the honey jar as a coaster. He stared at her. She smiled. The honey jar did not stick to the wood. He left the note where she had put it because sometimes surrender looks like good housekeeping.
They went for a walk that afternoon because she said the plants had told her the air outside was doing something interesting. He did not ask her to explain because he did not want explanation to become a condition for companionship.
They walked two streets under trees that had learned the shape of the wind in this neighborhood, and she told him the names of birds that he had always called birds, and he told her which houses were warded badly, and they did not hold hands because there will be a day for that and both of them knew it without needing to ruin this simple thing by naming an hour that had not arrived.
When they returned she left a book on the arm of his chair and said this one has been waiting to meet you. He asked when he should return it and she said when your eyes have decided they are finished talking to it. He nodded and did not attempt a joke because sometimes the right thing is to accept a gift and not prove that you are clever enough to keep it.
That evening he stood in the doorway after she left and did not pretend he would send her away tomorrow. He told himself he would, out of habit, because habits do not disappear when you fall into a new tide. He heard his own voice and it sounded tired rather than sure. He went to the sink and washed the cups again even though they were already clean. He dried them thoroughly because he had learned that water leaves marks if you let it sit, and he was not ready for marks that did not come from his own choices.
He worked until midnight and wrote without pain. He wrote a paragraph about how certain agents only agree to bind when the brewer's hands have had enough warmth from a person who likes to touch. He caught himself halfway through the sentence and smiled like a criminal, then crossed out nothing and let the page stand exactly as it was.
On the third morning she knocked and he met her at the door with a smile he forgot to smooth into civility. She noticed and did nothing about it except look pleased in a way that made the room feel taller. She brought a small jar of quince jam and told him not to insult it by spreading it too thin. He did as he was told and told himself that compliance could be a sophisticated form of rebellion and then laughed because the argument had lost before it started.
She stayed longer that day. She sat on his floor and sorted through a box of things he had kept without remembering why, a collection of small objects that had once carried a charge and then lost it. A spent vial that had held a famous draught. A smooth pebble from a river he had crossed on a night he refused to revisit. A badge from a conference where he had left before the keynote because the room had been full of people who loved the sound of their own theory more than the shape of anyone's life. She touched each item as if asking a question and set aside only two for the bin. He did not look to see which two. He told himself that trusting her to choose what he no longer needed was a small practice that would make the larger practice less frightening later on.
She taught him how to use her phone to order a loaf of bread from a bakery that delivered if you were kind to the app and tipped well. He typed with the intensity of a man disarming a trap and she did not laugh until the order went through, and then she laughed with him, not at him, and the room joined in, the way rooms do when they are learning a new sound they want to keep.
In the late afternoon she braided her hair at his table without a mirror, fingers moving with a memory older than habit, and he watched as if he had never seen a simple act of care performed. When she tied the end with a ribbon that had clearly done this work for years, he felt a pull in his chest that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the way a body recognises home in a gesture.
He did not tell her to stop coming tomorrow. He did not tell himself he would. He wrote it down in his head as a possible sentence and filed it under a drawer that would remain closed, and then he set water to boil because tea had become a way to agree that time had been well used.
By the time the streetlights came on he understood that there are promises you make without ceremony that hold more tightly than vows delivered in front of witnesses.
He had said every day in a tone that had tried to bite and had failed, and she had answered with a yes that had not needed to prove anything. The yes echoed now through the ordinary minutes. It rang when he rinsed a cup, when he aligned the edges of a stack of notes, when he lifted the plant on the sill and turned it toward light so that it would not have to do that work alone.
When she left on the fourth day she paused with her hand on the door and looked back as if she were memorising the sight of him in this doorway, or as if she were fixing him in place inside a photograph that would not fall even if the building shivered.
He told her to take the scarf because the weather would change by evening, and she told him to keep it because the air in his flat had decided that green did it good. They both smiled without needing to be clever, and then the door closed, and he stood there with his palm pressed to the wood as if he were testing the heart of a creature that had learned a new rhythm.
He walked to the table and found a small piece of paper under the honey jar. It was not Hermione's hand. It was Luna's, round and unhurried, a little crooked where the pen had protested the grain.
Thank you for letting the plants breathe. See you tomorrow when the light reaches the far corner of the rug.
He read it twice, then folded it once and set it in the drawer where he kept useful things, and for the first time in years he decided that a note could be a tool.
He slept well. He woke before the knock and watered the plants himself so that they would not look neglected, then laughed at the thought of impressing foliage, then laughed again at himself for caring about what she would see. The laugh sounded like a morning bell. It called him to the door when the rhythm began. He opened it and the day walked in, carrying a loaf shaped like the moon.
⋆.˚🦋༘⋆
Theo had rules about the kitchen. There was the half that belonged to potions, precise and sacred, with ingredients lined in alphabetical order, corks sealed in wax, labels written in his clean and unforgiving hand. And then there was the half that belonged to food, an entirely separate discipline, plain and orderly. The two halves never touched. This was not a matter of preference but survival.
So when he smelled smoke one quiet afternoon and heard an odd clatter of spoons against glass, he knew something was terribly wrong. He hurried down the hall, muttering darkly, and stopped dead in the doorway.
Luna stood at his counter, hair slipping from its braid, humming under her breath. She had opened one of the potion cupboards, not the harmless one with spices and tea leaves, but the other one, the one that contained items he kept under lock and preservation charm.
A jar of dried wolfsbane flowers sat open beside her. There was also a small bowl of marshroot, a pinch of dried knotgrass, and what looked horrifyingly like powdered moonstone scattered across the counter.
"What," Theo said, voice rising in horror, "are you doing?"
She looked up at him calmly, as though he had just asked whether she preferred tea or coffee. "Cooking."
His vision blurred with panic. "That is not cooking. That is sabotage. That is criminal destruction of property. Do you have any idea what you are holding?"
She glanced down at the spoon in her hand. "Yes. Wolfsbane. It smells quite sharp, doesn't it? I thought a little would add depth."
Theo strode across the kitchen, snatched the jar out of her reach, and slammed the lid back on. "Add depth to what? A lawsuit? An obituary? That ingredient is lethal in even small doses."
She blinked at him, unruffled. "I did not put very much. Only a pinch."
His heart pounded. "A pinch is enough to lay waste to your nervous system in under five minutes. I am fairly sure you would not find that pleasant."
She tilted her head. "Then perhaps you should not keep it so close to the nutmeg."
"That is not nutmeg," he snapped, reaching for another jar. "That is moonstone. Crushed by hand, carefully measured, for an experiment that has taken me six months. Six months, Luna. Do you know how many wizards still know how to grind moonstone properly? Three. And I am one of them. If you have contaminated it with whatever idiotic culinary fantasy you are playing at—"
Smoke curled up from the pan on the stove with a loud hiss. Theo cursed and ran to it, seizing the handle with his wand and flicking the fire lower. He turned back on her, eyes blazing.
"This is a potions laboratory. Not a… a free-spirited apothecary café."
She stirred calmly with a wooden spoon. "It is a kitchen. I am making lunch. You will like it."
"You cannot possibly know that."
"I can."
"You are insufferable," he growled, but he could already see that she was not going to stop. He tried to take the spoon from her and she held onto it with surprising strength. The pan tipped, liquid sloshed, and a puff of smoke exploded into his face. He stumbled back, coughing, and when the haze cleared, the front of his shirt was singed black at the hem.
Theo stared down at it, aghast. "This is imported fabric from Milan."
Luna smiled faintly. "Now it has character."
His voice broke with indignation. "Character? It is ruined. I will have to burn it entirely."
"You can keep it," she said serenely, stirring again. "It suits you. A little scorch here and there. Makes you less tidy."
He pinched the bridge of his nose, willing patience into his bloodstream. "You are deranged. Absolutely deranged. And you are forbidden from touching that cupboard again."
"Then perhaps you should put a stronger lock on it," she said without looking up. "But I think you will like this. Smell it."
Theo refused, crossing his arms like a barricade. "I will not participate in poisoning myself."
"It is not poison," she said. "Taste."
"I refuse."
She dipped the spoon and held it toward him, the steam curling into the air with a rich, earthy scent that startled him with how… edible it seemed. He leaned back, lips pressed thin.
"I am not eating that."
"Yes, you are."
"I am not."
"You are," she said gently, and the maddening part was that she looked absolutely certain.
He glared at her, then at the spoon, then back at her. He could feel the heat of her eyes, steady and patient, waiting for him to surrender. His pride screamed against it. His sanity clung to the last inch of resistance. And then, traitorously, his hand lifted, and he took the spoon.
He tasted it, preparing himself for bitterness, for ash, for death itself. Instead, the flavors unfurled on his tongue with startling warmth. It was strange, yes, and strong, and possibly illegal in four countries, but it was not bad. In fact, it was… good.
He froze, unwilling to admit it.
"Well," Luna asked.
He swallowed, cleared his throat, and fixed her with his most scathing look. "It is… not entirely offensive."
Her smile widened, soft and pleased. "I knew you would like it."
Theo dropped the spoon into the sink with unnecessary force and turned away, clutching at the tatters of his dignity. His shirt smelled like smoke. His kitchen smelled like anarchy. His cupboard had been raided like a battlefield. And yet, as he leaned on the counter, he could not stop the treacherous thought that maybe, just maybe, he would not mind if she cooked here again.
⋆.˚🦋༘⋆
Hermione picked a café that pretended not to know him. It had white walls and fern leaves that trailed from high shelves, round tables that were too close together, and a bell above the door that announced every entrance with a bright, innocent sound.
The place sat on the Muggle side of the boundary where magic thins and daily life takes over. It smelled like roasted beans and warm butter. Theo would have chosen somewhere dim, somewhere that swallowed conversation instead of reflecting it off bright tiles, but Hermione had arrived at his flat with a look that meant he was already late, and ten minutes later he found himself at a window table with sunlight on his collar and a cup he did not order cooling in front of him.
"You are sulking," she said, not even waiting for the first sip.
"I am sitting," he replied. "You confuse postures."
"You are sitting and sulking," she said, and the corners of her mouth lifted because she was pleased with herself. "How is your girlfriend."
He pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled through his teeth. "We have discussed this. She is not my girlfriend."
Hermione held her cup with both hands and leaned in. "How is Luna," she asked, entirely unbothered by titles.
Theo stared out at the pavement, where a child was dragging a stick along a railing and counting something only he could see. "She is alive. She visits. You know all of this."
Hermione hummed in a way that meant she knew more than he thought she knew. "Visits," she repeated, rolling the word around as if testing its sweetness. "Daily, as I understand it."
He did not answer. The fern in the corner was shedding and the fallen fronds made shapes on the floor that looked like runes. He watched them as if they might slide into a message that would save him. They did not.
Hermione set down her cup. "I am genuinely proud of you," she said, and for once the teasing left her voice. "You are letting someone in."
"Letting is a generous word," he said. "It implies agency."
"You invited her."
"I invited her to lunch," he said. "Once. I was drunk, she brought pizza, you have heard the story. She has continued to appear, which I acknowledge is a direct result of my mouth betraying me, and I am trying not to cause a catastrophe."
Hermione smoothed an invisible crease in the tablecloth. "Trying is good."
He gave her a long look. "I can feel the sermon building."
"Not a sermon," she said lightly. "A gentle pastoral note."
"Spare me," he said, and then, because he knew better than to pretend with her for long, he added, "I like it when she is there."
Hermione's smile softened. "I know."
He watched people pass in the street and tried to decide whether confession had made the room fall quieter or whether he had imagined it. A waitress slid a plate of something golden and flaky onto the next table and a man in a jacket that did not fit smiled at the woman across from him as if he could not help it. Theo looked back down at his coffee, which had cooled to the exact temperature he disliked, and drank it anyway.
"You are orchestrating something," he said after a moment. "I can smell it on you. It is like soap and ink and meddling."
Hermione did not even pretend to deny it. "I am ensuring conditions remain favorable."
"For what," he asked, even though he knew the answer.
"For your happiness," she said, and she said it so plainly that he almost forgave her at once.
The bell above the door chimed and Draco arrived, immaculate in a dark coat that did not catch the light and a smile that looked as if it had been pressed carefully into place. He glanced around once, saw them, and approached with the air of a man who found himself in a curious exhibit and had decided to offer notes.
"Domesticity suits you, Nott," Draco said, sliding into the spare chair without waiting to be invited. "You look almost hydrated."
Theo closed his eyes briefly. "Why is he here."
"Because I told him to come," Hermione said. "He is part of the intervention."
"We are not staging an intervention," Theo said. "We are having coffee."
Draco signaled to the waitress with two fingers and turned back with a look of clinical interest. "How is your little homestead experiment," he asked. "Has the free-spirited one taught you how to buy fruit without interrogating it."
"She is not free-spirited," Theo said. "She is disciplined in a way you would not understand."
Hermione hid a smile behind her cup. Draco's eyebrows lifted. "Disciplined. Adorable. Tell me more."
"She cooks in my kitchen," Theo said, and immediately regretted telling them even that much.
Draco's grin sharpened. "Of course she does. Has she redecorated your soul in tasteful pastels."
"She reorganised nothing," Theo said. "She did water the plants."
"The plants are your children," Draco said. "Congratulations on finding a responsible co-parent."
Theo looked at the ceiling and prayed for patience. The waitress arrived and deposited a small espresso in front of Draco, who thanked her with a nod and then turned back with renewed appetite for mischief.
"So," Draco said, and the word stretched just enough to make Theo want to throw salt over his shoulder. "Your girlfriend."
"Not my girlfriend," Theo said. "Stop doing that."
"An accurate label would save time," Draco said. "But we can stick with girlfriend in training if you prefer."
Hermione kicked him lightly under the table. "Do not frighten him into the Thames."
"I am not frightened," Theo said, and the lie tasted thin as paper. "I am annoyed."
"Annoyed is a cousin of terrified," Draco said. "Distant, but recognizable at family gatherings."
Theo leaned forward, elbows on the table. "I will hex you in a Muggle café."
Draco stirred his espresso. "You will not."
Hermione cut in with the voice she used in court. "You will not," she repeated, more to Theo than to Draco. "There are security cameras and also a man with a pram. You will not traumatise anyone today."
Theo swallowed what he wanted to say because he had no wish to terrify a room full of people whose greatest danger that morning was a slightly overdone croissant. He pressed his palms flat against his knees until the urge to laugh or shout or do both at once faded.
"Tell us about the rhythm," Hermione said, returning to gentleness. "What does a day look like now."
"She knocks," he said. "We drink tea. She talks to the plants. Sometimes she reads aloud. Sometimes I work and she paints her nails and tells me I am missing a solution that is sitting at my elbow. She is usually correct, which is irritating. We walk. She leaves."
"And you breathe better," Hermione said.
He did not answer. He did not have to. Draco watched him with an expression Theo had seldom seen on that face, something near to fondness if anyone could have accused Malfoy of such a thing and lived. Draco looked down into his cup as if embarrassed by the tenderness and then disguised it with disdain.
"So he has been domesticated," Draco announced. "I suppose we should get him a collar with his name on it and a tag that reads please return to the woman with the moon in her pocket."
Hermione laughed, and Theo tried not to. "I will pour this cold coffee into your shoe," he said.
Draco tipped his head. "A violent man. I am thrilled by your growth."
Hermione reached into her bag for something, then stopped with her hand halfway inside, as if she had remembered she needed to appear innocent. She withdrew a folded flyer instead and slid it across the table to Theo. A street market advert was printed on bright paper. There were vendors listed, a honey stall circled in ink that was very obviously hers, and a small map with a red line drawn from his building to the corner where the market would set up tomorrow morning.
"You will like this," she said. "Fresh bread. Flowers. There is a glassmaker who does small bottles that would look good on your shelf if you could bear to own something that exists only to be beautiful."
"You have planned my weekend," he said.
"I have offered options," she replied.
Draco leaned, read the flyer, and smirked. "Option is her euphemism for fate."
Theo narrowed his eyes. "You are both tiresome."
"That is correct," Draco said. "And yet you continue to show up when we call."
"Only because you arrive at my door and drag me outside," Theo said, but the heat had gone from his voice.
Hermione stood. "I need the ladies," she said, and left them to it. She took her bag with her, which meant nothing to most people and everything to Theo. He watched the door swing behind her and tried to decide whether she had gone to write to someone or whether he was simply paranoid.
Draco took a slow sip of espresso. "She is writing to someone," he said, as if he had read Theo's thoughts. "If you think she is not nudging the universe with a stick, you have not known her at all."
"I do not want her to manage my life," Theo said.
"Then manage it yourself," Draco said. "Invite the girl to dinner without burning your own kitchen. Buy a proper phone and stop pretending you can arrange a romance with owls and crossed fingers. You are a competent man. Try proving it to yourself."
Theo looked at the street again because the truth always sounded louder when it came from the mouth he least wanted to credit. A courier cycled past with a crate of oranges strapped to the back. A woman paused to tie her shoe and laughed at something her companion said. The bell chimed again and Hermione returned, fresh-faced and clearly pleased with herself.
"Everything all right," she asked with false innocence.
"You are meddling," Theo said.
"I am supporting," she said.
"You sent a message," he said.
She did not deny it. "Luna is very busy," she said, and her tone suggested a cascade of commitments that would shame a saint. "The world tries to claim her time. I am reminding the world that you get some."
Theo sat back. "You cannot keep doing this."
Hermione's smile softened in a way that made him feel twelve and stubborn. "If I stop, will you start."
He felt the ground tilt. He hated it. He loved it a little. He removed his hands from the table and placed them in his lap as if that might level the floor. "I can try," he said.
"Good," Hermione said. "Then this is the last time I interfere."
Draco snorted into his cup. "You are lying to him."
Hermione kept her eyes on Theo. "I am giving him a chance to believe me."
The waitress arrived with a plate of biscuits on the house because Hermione had a way of making people feel like kindness was always a good idea. Draco reached for one and made a face at the sugar, then ate it anyway. Theo took the smallest and pretended he did not enjoy it. Hermione took two and set one in front of Theo without asking. He sighed and ate that as well.
"You should know," Draco said, licking a bit of sugar from his thumb with regal misery, "that I have been bribed."
Theo frowned. "By whom."
"By the Minister's favorite barrister," Draco said, jerking his head at Hermione. "A case of Clos de something I cannot pronounce if I make sure you do not hide for the next fortnight."
"She is buying your loyalty with wine," Theo said.
"She is renting it," Draco said. "At a fair rate."
Hermione refused to blush. "It is good wine. He is tiresome and helpful in equal measure."
"I am a public service," Draco said.
"You are a walking warning label," Hermione replied, but she was smiling.
Theo finished the last of his coffee, which had gone from tepid to tragic, and steadied himself on the quiet that follows the end of a small, unimportant argument. He could feel the shape of the day waiting for him back at the flat. He could hear the plant leaving new green along the edge of a leaf. He could imagine Luna at his table with a book open and the air moving around her like a cat that had claimed a sunny spot.
"Tell me what you did," he said, turning to Hermione. "All of it."
"Today," she said, and the bravado left her just enough for honesty to enter. "I told her about the market and the honey. I reminded her that you do not eat breakfast without supervision. I sent her the tiny schedule you pretend you do not keep. I asked if she would like me to deliver a book to you on her behalf, and she said no, she would prefer to bring it herself. I may have mentioned that you look different when you speak about her."
Theo stared at her for the space of two heartbeats. "You told her that."
"I did," Hermione said. "Because she should know. People deserve to hear how they change a room."
"Manipulative," Draco murmured, yet his voice had lost its edge.
"Effective," Hermione said, quiet now, because the loud part of meddling had already done its work.
Theo rubbed a thumb along the rim of the cup and felt a grain he had missed. "I do not know how to be someone who does not fight every good thing before letting it in."
Hermione reached across the table and set her hand over his. "Then do not fight it alone."
He did not pull away. It struck him that there were three kinds of touch in a life. There was the careless kind, which lacked meaning and simply recorded time. There was the necessary kind, which moved bodies and objects toward their tasks. Then there was the kind that said keep going. He let that hand sit over his and allowed it to speak.
Draco made a face to keep the universe from thinking he had gone soft. "If you begin weeping in here," he said, "I will stage a scene so dramatic they will ban us."
Theo smiled despite himself. "You could never give up the coffee."
"I could give up anything that threatens my reputation," Draco said. "Except possibly my hair."
The bell chimed again and a breeze moved through the doorway, carrying city air and the sound of someone singing to themselves because no one was listening. Hermione withdrew her hand and checked her watch with a small, satisfied sound that meant the timing had landed exactly where she wanted it.
"You should go," she said to Theo, as if she had not choreographed the entire afternoon. "You have someone coming at the hour when the light reaches the far corner of the rug."
Theo felt his mouth twitch. "You have a spy."
"I have a friend who leaves notes in a place you will see them," she said. "I am only marginally less unbearable than I seem."
Draco stood and straightened his coat. "I will escort our delicate flower to the street and make sure no one steals her on the way to whatever benevolent crime she commits next."
Hermione rose with him, the picture of a woman who had gotten exactly what she came for and would now pretend it had all been an accident. Theo remained seated for a moment longer, because the sunlight on the table looked patient and it felt important to take one more breath before returning to the place where the day would complete itself.
He paid. Draco failed to stop him and then claimed that Theo owed him nothing but suffering. Hermione thanked the barista by name because of course she had learned it on her first visit and had used it every time since. They walked out together and stood under the little awning while a brief mist tried to become rain and failed. Draco lit a cigarette and did not inhale, simply held it like a prop that proved he still possessed sins. Hermione tucked her hair behind her ear and looked at Theo as if he were a case she believed the jury would find in favour of without needing to hear closing arguments.
"Do not hex us," she said, smiling.
"I will save it for the wedding," Draco added.
Theo looked at them both and shook his head. "If there is a wedding I will ensure you are seated at a table by the kitchen door."
Draco preened. "I thrive by the kitchen. The staff will love me."
"The staff will hide from you," Hermione said.
"They will hide under the table with me," Draco replied.
Theo glanced toward the end of the street where the trees stood with new leaves and the pavement curved toward a row of townhouses that looked as if they had stories stacked behind every brick. He felt the hour shifting. He felt the pull of a promise he had made without ceremony. He felt ridiculous and alive.
"Thank you," he said to Hermione, and he tried not to mean it as widely as he did.
"You are welcome," she said, accepting the larger meaning as if it were a parcel she had been expecting.
Draco flicked ash into a small tin because he would not litter even when pretending not to care. "Go on then," he said. "Off to your little domestic scene. Remember to keep the wolfsbane in the cupboard and the woman out of the moonstone. That is my professional advice."
Theo turned to go, then paused. "You are both insufferable," he said.
Hermione laughed. "And you are loved."
He did not try to answer that. He nodded once and set off, hands in his pockets, collar turned up against a breeze that had grown just enough to make the day feel alert. The walk back took him past the market square where stalls were already being assembled for morning, canvas stretched over frames and ropes pulled tight with the rhythm of work people who know their craft use without thinking. He bought nothing. He looked and learned where things would be. He imagined pointing at jars and listening to someone distill their honey into sentences about weather and soil.
He climbed the stairs to his building with a steadiness he did not have a week ago. The second step still creaked, and he still shifted his weight to avoid it. He opened his door and the flat greeted him with the air of a room that had not been empty at all but simply waiting for a person to resume the conversation. He crossed to the window and turned the small plant toward the light that had crept onto the sill and thought about the note tucked into the drawer. He washed a cup without needing it and set it beside the kettle so that it could wait without feeling alone. He checked the clock, which was ordinary and plain and correct, and then he stood in the middle of the room and placed his palms against the line of the table in a way that felt like claiming his own life.
When the knock came it was not loud. It did not need to be. He crossed the room and opened the door and Luna stood there with a book pressed to her chest and a look that said she had made time and would keep making it. She smiled, and the shape of the day settled into its place as if it had been carved for this very hour.
"You found the market," she said, glancing past him at the flyer Hermione had left on the sideboard.
"I did," he said. "I will take you tomorrow."
"Good," she said. "I brought a recipe that does not require moonstone."
He stepped aside and let her in, and as the door closed, he thought of Hermione and Draco and their talk of domestication and collars and sins, and he felt the oddest thing, which was gratitude that the people who loved him were willing to be unbearable to deliver him to a life he might have missed.
He did not say any of that out loud. He took the book from Luna's hands, set it on the table, and asked whether she preferred mint or the black tea that woke his bones. She said mint to be kind to his heart. He boiled water and watched steam rise and thought about a phone he would soon have to buy, and about a market that would welcome them in the morning, and about the way a room can hold two people without forcing either one to shrink. He listened to the water and to her breath and to the quiet that is not empty but full of what comes next.