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The tea had gone cold twenty minutes ago. Ginny hadn't touched it.
"We argued again," she said, turning the mug in slow circles on the table.
Hermione looked up from where she was pretending to read. "What about this time?"
"You know."
"Tell me anyway."
Ginny exhaled through her nose, that exhale of hers, the one that meant she was deciding how honest to be. "The usual. He wants to settle down, properly settle, now the Auror thing is solid. And I—" She stopped. Started again. "I've been playing for the Harpies four years, Hermione. Four. I'm still fast, I'm still fit, they still want me, and he's talking about children like it's the next logical step. Like I'm the next logical step." She looked at her cold tea. "I'm scared if I do it now they'll bin me before I'm thirty. That I'll have given it all up for—"
She didn't finish.
Hermione set her book down properly this time. She had suspected, for a long while now, that the argument was never quite about quidditch.
"Is that all?" she asked, carefully.
Ginny's jaw tightened. "What else would there be?"
Hermione said nothing. That was, sometimes, the most effective thing she could do.
The silence stretched. Outside, rain tapped against the window. Ginny turned the mug one more time, and then stopped, like something in her had gone still.
"There was someone," she said finally. "After the war. It was—" She laughed, short and humourless. "It was nothing. We both knew it was nothing."
Hermione's expression didn't change. It softened at the edges in a way that was almost worse than pity.
"Tell me about him."
Ginny opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked away toward the window where the rain was still going, indifferent and steady.
"I don't think I can," she said quietly. "Because if I do—" A breath. "If I say it out loud, I have to admit that he was right. He could give me everything, Mione. Everything I actually wanted. And I still chose Harry."
The word chose landed in the room like something dropped from a height.
Hermione didn't rush to fill the silence. She had learned, over years of loving Ginny Weasley, that rushing her was the fastest way to make her shut down completely.
"Right about what?" she asked, eventually. Gently.
Ginny's thumb pressed into the handle of the cold mug.
"That it didn't have to be temporary."
She'd said it was the last time.
She'd meant it, the time before this one. And the time before that.
But then she'd seen him in the Leaky, and he'd had his sleeves rolled up, and there was ink she didn't recognise on his forearm, new work, something dark curling up his bicep— and she'd looked at him across the bar for approximately four seconds before she'd abandoned her drink entirely.
So here she was. Again.
The sun came through the gap in his curtains at an angle, landing across the sheets in a stripe that crossed her bare shoulder and the curve of his. Theo was on his back, eyes half-closed, not quite asleep and not quite here. His hand was loose in her hair. Doing nothing with it. Just resting there, like she was something he got to keep.
She was going to have to tell him.
"Theo."
"Mm."
"Harry asked me out."
His hand stilled.
He didn't move for a long moment. The hand in her hair stayed where it was, neither pulling away nor pressing closer. Just suspended. Like he was waiting for the rest of it, even though he already knew there wasn't any.
"And?" he said. His voice came out even. An evenness she'd learned to dread more than shouting.
"And I think I'm going to go."
The hand dropped. Not dramatically. Just fell, back to the mattress, like something had gone out of it.
Theo stared at the ceiling. The sunlight didn't care. It kept doing what it was doing, warm and indifferent across the sheets, across the new ink on his bicep, across the line of his jaw that she'd had her mouth on not two hours ago.
"Right," he said.
"Theo—"
"No, I—" He exhaled. Almost a laugh, but not quite. "Right. Harry Potter." He said the name like he was testing the weight of it. Finding it exactly as heavy as he'd always known it would be. "Of course."
She sat up, pulling the sheet with her. She didn't know why. He'd seen everything. He knew everything. The modesty was absurd and she did it anyway.
"It's not— it's complicated. You know it's complicated. We were on a break and—"
"Ginny." Just her name. Quiet. Final.
She stopped.
He turned his head to look at her then. Because he didn't look angry. He didn't look betrayed. He looked at her the way he always looked at her, like she was something he'd already made his peace with losing, long before she'd actually gone.
He reached up. Pushed her hair back from her face with two fingers, slow and deliberate. Looked at her like he was trying to memorise something.
"Who's to say this has to be temporary, Gingersnaps."
Not a question. It never had been.
"We can make this work," he said. Still quiet. Still that terrible evenness. "Look at us, Ginny. Look at how well we work."
She didn't say anything.
"I'm not asking you to announce it in the Prophet. I'm not asking you to bring me to Sunday dinner at the Burrow." The corner of his mouth moved, something that wasn't quite a smile. "I'm asking you to not go back to someone you don't love because it's easier than admitting what this is."
"Theo—"
"How ironic," he said, almost to himself. The almost-smile had gone. "You'd think it would be me. From the ancient and most noble house of Nott." He said it the way you say something you've been taught to be proud of and learned instead to carry. "You'd think I'd be the one forcing myself into a marriage I didn't want. Doing the dutiful thing. Preserving the name." He looked at her. "And now look."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing she'd ever heard.
"It's not the same," she said finally. Her voice came out smaller than she intended.
"No," he agreed. "It's not. Because nobody's making you do anything."
She sat in it. The weight of nobody's making you do anything pressing down on her sternum like something physical.
"I don't know what I want," she said finally. It came out honest in a way she hadn't planned. "I don't— I can't see it clearly when I'm here. With you. Everything feels—" She stopped.
"Feels like what?"
She shook her head. Couldn't finish it.
He didn't push. That was the thing about Theo, the thing she could never quite explain to herself, he never pushed. He just waited, and the waiting was somehow worse than any demand would have been.
"I should go," she said.
She got up. Found her clothes the way you did the morning after, shirt on the chair, jeans on the floor, one sock inexplicably near the window. She dressed with her back to him, which was cowardly, and she knew it.
She heard him get up. Didn't hear him cross the room, because he moved like that, like something unhurried and inevitable. And then his hands were on her shoulders, turning her, and he kissed her one last time in the sunlight.
When he pulled back he kept his forehead against hers for just a moment.
She closed her eyes.
"Don't wait for me," she whispered.
A beat.
"I won't," he said.
She left. And she told herself she believed him. It was easier that way, to walk out into the bright uncomplicated morning and believe that Theodore Nott would do the sensible thing, the practical thing, the thing she'd basically asked him to do.
She told herself that all the way home.
She told herself that for six years.
Hermione was watching Ginny with that expression. The one that meant she'd already done the calculations.
"It was Theodore, wasn't it."
Not a question.
Ginny's head snapped up. "How did you—"
"I'm seeing Draco." Hermione said it simply, brushing over it before Ginny could ask any questions. "Have been for a while now. So I see Theo and Blaise. We have dinner sometimes, the four of us, and he's—" She paused, choosing carefully. "There's something about him. Like he's standing in a room and waiting for someone to walk through the door. He doesn't do it obviously. You'd miss it if you didn't know what you were looking for."
Ginny had gone very still.
"I clocked it," Hermione continued quietly. "Back then. I didn't say anything because it wasn't mine to say. But you were— Gin, you were happy. Do you remember that? You had this lightness about you, that whole year after the war. You were still you, still reckless and sharp and all of it, but you had a— a centre. Like something was holding you steady from the inside."
She looked at her. Really looked.
"Now it's like you have an anchor. And there's a difference."
The rain kept going. Ginny stared at the cold tea.
"He's still—" She couldn't finish it.
"I don't know," Hermione said honestly. "He'd never say. But yes. I think so."
She cried.
It wasn't dramatic. That was the thing that undid Hermione completely, it wasn't the kind of crying you could respond to with a tissue and a hand on the back. Ginny didn't sob. She didn't make a sound, almost. Her eyes just filled and spilled over, quiet and relentless, like something had finally breached a wall that had been holding for a very long time.
Hermione froze.
She had seen Ginny Weasley hex three boys simultaneously in fourth year. She had seen her take a Bludger to the shoulder in sixth and shake it off mid-dive. She had seen her walk back into the Great Hall after the battle with her chin up and her wand hand steady even though Fred was—
She had seen her cry then. Once. Just once, in the horrible hours after, folded into her mother while the rest of them stood around not knowing where to put themselves.
That was the only time.
The protocol for this did not exist in any book Hermione had ever read. She ran through options with the desperation of someone who processes panic as a list. Tea, already cold, useless. Words, what words, what could possibly. A hug, she should but Ginny hadn't moved, was sitting perfectly upright, crying silently like she didn't even know she was doing it, and somehow touching her felt like it might shatter something.
So Hermione did the only thing she could think of.
She reached across the table and put her hand over Ginny's.
Said nothing.
Just stayed.
Ginny turned her hand over and held on.
The kitchen was warm. It was always warm. She'd done that, the herbs on the windowsill, the good pots, the particular yellow of the walls that Harry had let her choose because whatever you want, Gin, it's your home too.
It was his home. That was the problem.
She got in at half seven with her kit bag still on her shoulder and mud on her boots she hadn't bothered with at the door and every muscle in her body staging a quiet revolt. Training had been brutal. Coach had them running drills until two of the reserves cried and Ginny had wanted to, only she didn't do that, so she'd flown harder instead.
Harry was already home. She could tell by the coat on the hook, not quite straight and the light on in the sitting room.
"Hey," he called.
"Hey," she called back.
This was them. This was the shape of their evenings.
She dropped her bag and went to the kitchen and put the kettle on because it gave her hands something to do. Harry appeared in the doorway a minute later, loosened tie, the exhaustion of a man who'd been doing something important and difficult all day. He looked at her the way he always looked at her. Like she was something he couldn't believe he got to come home to.
She used to find that look wonderful.
"Bad day?" he asked.
"Long. You?"
"Ridiculous." He came in, opened the fridge, stood in front of it with the blankness of someone who'd forgotten what they were looking for. "MacMillan lost the suspect on the Muggle border and I spent four hours doing the paperwork for his mess. Again."
"Mm."
He closed the fridge. Looked at her. She was staring at the kettle.
"Gin."
"I've been thinking," she said. To the kettle. "About us."
The air in the warm yellow kitchen changed.
"Okay," Harry said carefully.
"I think we should separate." She'd rehearsed this. She'd rehearsed it on the broom, in the shower, on the walk from the apparition point. It still came out wrong, too flat, too sudden, landing in the middle of the kitchen like something dropped. "Not— not divorce. Not yet. Just. Some space. To think."
Harry was quiet for a moment.
"I don't—" He stopped. Tried again. "I don't understand what there is to think about."
And there it was. Not anger. Not accusation. Just genuine bewilderment. He was looking at her like she'd said something in a language he didn't speak, like if he waited long enough she'd translate it into something that made sense.
"Harry—"
"Are you unhappy?" He said it like the concept was something he could fix. Like unhappy was a problem with a solution and he just needed her to show him where it was. "Because if something's wrong we can— we can talk about it, we can go to someone, there are people who—"
"It's not something someone can fix."
"Then what is it?" His voice cracked slightly on the last word. Not with anger. With confusion. With the lostness of someone who has built everything around one thing and cannot see how it could possibly be failing. "We have a good life, Gin. We have a — this is a good life."
She looked at the warm kitchen. The herbs on the windowsill. The yellow walls she'd chosen.
"I know," she said quietly. "I know it is."
"Then—"
"That's not the same as it being the right one."
The kettle boiled. Neither of them moved to do anything about it.
"I can't—" She pressed her fingers to her forehead. "I can't explain it in a way that would make sense. I've tried, in my head, I've tried a hundred times and it never—" She exhaled. "It never comes out right."
"Try," Harry said. Not unkindly. That was the worst part. He was never unkind.
"It's like—" She looked at the yellow walls. "It's like I'm living someone else's life. A life that was built for someone and I just— I moved into it. And it fits, technically. On paper it fits perfectly. But it was never—" She stopped.
Harry was watching her with those eyes. Those terrible earnest eyes that had looked at her like she hung the moon since she was eleven years old and known her own feelings better than he ever could.
"It was never mine," she finished quietly.
The silence was long.
"I think I'm going to stay at Hermione's tonight," she said. "Just— I need to think. I need some space to—"
"Okay," he said. His voice had gone somewhere far away. "Okay, Gin."
She hated how easy he made it. How he just accepted it, folded it in, because he loved her and loving her meant letting her go when she asked even when he didn't understand why she was asking.
She didn't bother packing a bag, instead she tried to collect herself in their room. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom watching her and didn't say anything else and that was somehow the hardest thing she'd ever walked away from.
"I'll owl you," she said.
"Yeah," he said.
She apparated from the front step.
She did not go to Hermione's.
She stood on his street for a full minute before she knocked.
When Theo opened the door he took her in, the mud still on her boots, the look on her face and said nothing. Just stepped back to let her in.
She crossed the threshold.
He closed the door behind her.
"I told Harry I needed space," she said to the hallway.
"Okay," Theo said.
"I told him I was going to Hermione's."
"I know, you wouldn't have told him you'd come here."
She turned around. He was leaning against the closed door with his arms folded, watching her with that look. The one that saw everything and said very little.
"I don't know why I'm here," she said.
"Yes you do."
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
He pushed off the door and walked past her toward the kitchen. "I'll make tea," he said, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Like she hadn't just shown up at his door six years later with mud on her boots and a marriage she was unravelling.
"Theo."
He stopped.
"He didn't understand," she said. "I tried to explain it and he just— he couldn't see it. He kept looking at me like I was speaking another language."
Theo was quiet for a moment, his back still to her.
"Yeah, I see why it would have gotten like that," he said.
"How?"
He turned then. Looked at her across the hallway of the flat that had sunlight through the curtains six years ago and lamplight now and her, always somehow her, standing in the middle of it.
"Because I've always understood you," he said simply. "And you've spent years pretending that doesn't matter."
She followed him into the kitchen.
It was tidier than she remembered. Same layout, different details, a plant on the windowsill she didn't recognise, books stacked on the counter, and she knew why, he always read, no matter the room. It felt lived in. It felt like him.
He was filling the kettle.
"I think I need something stronger," she said.
He didn't miss a beat. Set the kettle down, opened the cabinet above the fridge, produced a bottle of whisky that looked expensive, like a treat. Two glasses.
She sat at his kitchen table.
He sat across from her and poured and didn't say anything and that was exactly what she needed in that moment.
She drank. It burned cleanly.
"I left him," she said. "I mean— not officially. I said space. But I left him."
"I know."
"I don't know if I can go back." She looked at him, in his silence. "You're not going to say anything?"
"You didn't come here for me to say things." He turned his glass slowly on the table. "You came here because you needed somewhere to be that wasn't there."
She laughed, short and strange. "That's annoyingly perceptive."
"I have my moments."
She drank again. The warmth of it spread through her chest and loosened something she'd been holding so tightly for so long she'd forgotten it was clenched.
And then, without any warning at all, she started to cry.
Not like in Hermione's kitchen, that quiet overflow, that wall finally breaching. This was different. This was worse. This was six years of compound interest on a grief she'd never properly paid and it came out of her in a way that was almost embarrassing, the kind of crying that has sound to it, the kind she never allowed herself, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth like she could stop it and couldn't.
Theo set his glass down.
He didn't say it's okay or don't cry or any of the things people said when they didn't know what else to do. He just got up, came around the table, and sat in the chair beside her and put his arm around her and let her.
She cried until there wasn't anything left, her head on his shoulder.
When it finally stopped she was exhausted, the same kind of exhuassting of someone who has put something down that they'd been carrying for far too long. She straightened up. Wiped her face with the back of her hand. Looked at the table.
"I've cried thrice," she said. Her voice came out wrecked. "In my entire adulthood. Thrice."
Theo was quiet for a moment.
"When?" he asked. Carefully.
She picked up her glass. Put it down again.
"When Fred died." Flat and final. "And in Hermione's kitchen yesterday morning." She paused. "And now."
She felt him go very still beside her.
"Ginny—"
"Don't." She shook her head. "Don't be kind about it, I can't— if you're kind about it I'll start again."
He said nothing. But his hand, which had been resting on her shoulder, moved to the back of her neck, just resting there, warm and steady.
The lamplight held them both. Outside it had stopped raining. She could hear the city doing its ordinary thing, indifferent and ongoing, the way cities always were.
"I should have said yes," she whispered. "Six years ago. When you asked me not to go."
Theo's hand stilled on the back of her neck.
"You weren't ready," he said.
"I'm not sure I'm ready now."
"I know."
"But I'm here," she said. Like it was a question. Like she needed him to tell her what it meant.
He turned to look at her. That look. The one that had never changed, not once, in six years of her choosing everything else.
"You're here," he said simply.
They talked until the whisky was low and long into the night.
She told him about the Harpies. About the season, the new coach, the way she still felt most like herself at three hundred feet with the wind doing what it wanted. He listened the way he always had, not waiting for his turn to speak, actually listening, asking questions that meant he'd heard her.
He told her about his work. Import and export of rare magical artefacts, which she'd always suspected was at least thirty percent legally questionable and which he neither confirmed nor denied with a composure that was almost funny. He told her about his annual trip to Florence in the spring. About a painting he'd bought that he didn't know what to do with.
"Where is it?" she asked.
"Facing the wall in the spare room."
"Theo."
"It's very confrontational," he said, entirely seriously. "I'm not ready to secure it somwhere."
She laughed. A real one, the kind that came from somewhere uncomplicated. She'd forgotten she could still do that.
At some point they moved to the sofa without quite deciding to, the way you do when a conversation has been going long enough that the furniture rearranges itself around it. She was on one end, legs tucked under her, her wearing his hoodie, at some point without her noticing he'd put it there.
She was mid-sentence about the new reserve Seeker when she stopped.
Theo waited.
She didn't start again.
He looked over and she was asleep. Just like that, between one word and the next, like her body had simply decided it was done. Her head had dropped against the back of the sofa, one hand still loosely around the glass he carefully reached over and took from her fingers.
He sat with it for a moment.
Her face was different when she slept. The thing she held in her jaw all the time, that readiness, was gone. She looked younger. She looked like someone who had put something very heavy down and not yet remembered she'd been carrying it.
He set the glass on the table.
Then he got up, carefully, and lifted her. She stirred slightly, made a small sound, turned her face against his shoulder and then was still again. He carried her down the hall to his room and folded back the covers one-handed with the focus of someone trying very hard not to wake something. Laid her down. Pulled the duvet over her.
She didn't wake.
He stood in the doorway for a moment longer than he needed to.
Then he turned off the light and went back down the hall and lay down on his own sofa with one arm over his face.
The city did its indifferent ongoing thing outside.
Theodore Nott, who had waited six years without meaning to, who had told her he wouldn't and done it anyway, stared at the ceiling of his sitting room and listened to her breathe two rooms away.
He'd waited this long.
He could wait a little longer.
She woke up disoriented staring at an unfamiliar ceilings.
Then she remembered.
She lay there for a moment, in his sheets that smelled like him, in the grey early light that came through curtains she didn't choose, and took stock of herself. She felt hollowed out in the way you feel after crying properly. Lighter. Scraped clean.
She got up. Found her socks she kicked off in the middle of the night. Padded down the hall.
He was on the sofa. On his back, one arm over his face, still in yesterday's clothes. The whisky glasses were on the table.
She sat down on the edge of the sofa cushion beside his feet.
He stirred. Moved his arm. Looked at her with the unguarded quality of someone not yet fully awake, before the composure came back online.
"Morning," he said. His voice was rough.
"You gave me your bed."
"You were asleep."
"Theo. You gave me your bed and slept on your own sofa."
He sat up slowly, rubbing a hand over his face. "You say that like I didn't have lessons in chivalry."
She looked at him. The morning light was doing something honest to his face, something she was starting to remember. Just him. Just Theo, who had always been just Theo underneath everything else.
"I'm going to divorce him," she said.
He went still.
"Not— I'm not saying that because of this. Or not only because of this. I think I've known for a while and I just—" She looked at her hands. "I needed to say it out loud to someone who wouldn't try to talk me out of it or fall apart about it."
"Okay," he said quietly.
"And that doesn't mean—" She looked up. "That doesn't mean I'm going to jump into something. I need time. I need to just be— I need to figure out who I am when I'm not someone's something. Harry's girlfriend, Harry's wife, Ron's little sisteer, the Harpies' Chaser." She shook her head. "I need to just be Ginny for a bit."
Theo looked at her for a long moment.
"Six years," he said, "will make any time you ask for feel very short."
Something moved through her chest.
"I didn't ask you to wait," she said softly. Not cruelly.
He held her gaze.
"You're right," he said. "I wanted to."
She reached over and took his hand.
Didn't say anything.
Didn't need to.
He turned his hand over and held hers, the way she'd held Hermione's across the kitchen table, and they sat there in the quiet morning with six years behind them and whatever came next still unwritten.
It took exactly two hundred and fifty four days for Ginny Weasley to become his.
Not in the way that meant ownership, Theo would have laughed at that, and she would have hexed him. In the way that meant she showed up at his door on a Tuesday with a box of her things and said I found a flat but I thought maybe I'd leave some of this here and he'd opened the door wider without a word and that was that.
The divorce was quieter than anyone expected. Harry had been sad in the way of someone losing something they'd loved truly and held wrongly, which was the saddest kind of sad there was. She'd cried about it, her fourth time, she noted distantly and he'd cried too, and they'd parted as people who had been genuinely important to each other and simply run out of road.
He'd been alright. Better than alright, eventually.
It was Pansy Parkinson of all people who'd found him, or found him again, properly, over drinks at a bar neither of them had meant to be in, two people who understood what it was to be on the outside of something looking in. Two divorcees, as it happened. She'd told him he had terrible taste in ties. He'd told her she was terrifying. They'd been largely inseparable since, which was so improbable that Ginny had laughed until she couldn't breathe the first time Theo told her, and then felt something loosen in her chest that had been knotted since the kitchen with the yellow walls.
She was glad. She was genuinely, uncomplicated glad.
She spent two hundred and fifty four days being Ginny. Just Ginny. She flew until her shoulders ached and went out with her teammates and had dinner with her mother who didn't understand and loved her anyway and sat in Theo's kitchen at odd hours talking about nothing and everything and slowly, without marking the exact moment it happened, stopped feeling like someone who had escaped something and started feeling like someone who had arrived somewhere.
Theo waited. Not passively but patiently. He took her to Florence, to his home there and showed her the painting he'd finally put on the wall, which was confrontational in exactly the way he'd described and which she loved immediately and told him so. He came to her matches and stood in the crowd like an ordinary person because she hadn't asked him to and he understood without being told. He made her tea and occasionally something stronger and never once made her feel like a clock was running.
On the two hundred and fifty fourth day she kissed him first.
He'd been in the middle of a sentence. She'd simply decided she was done waiting for the right moment and kissed him and he'd stopped mid-word and kissed her back like he'd been ready for exactly this long.
"Took you long enough, Gingersnaps," he'd said, against her mouth.
"Shut up, Nott," she'd said, and kissed him again.
It took another three hundred and sixty two days on top of that.
The ceremony was small. Obscenely small by any standard either of their families might have preferred, which was precisely the point. Twelve people in the garden of a house in the south of France that belonged to a friend of Theo's whose name Ginny could never pronounce correctly. String lights. Good wine. Her mother crying before it even started. Draco Malfoy as best man, looking emotional and deeply annoyed about it. Hermione catching Ginny's eye across the aisle and smiling the smile of someone who had known all along and been kind enough not to say so.
She wore something simple. She'd never been a dress person, not really, but this one felt like hers, felt chosen rather than expected. There was a veil because her mother had asked and she loved her mother, and when Theo kissed her he lifted the veil himself, slowly and dipped her backwards as he kissed her.
Afterward, when someone asked, she was Ginny Weasley.
She'd looked at Theo when the registrar asked about the name, a flicker of something, question, permission, uncertainty and he'd shaken his head, just slightly. Almost imperceptible.
Keep it, his eyes had said. It's yours.
She had spent so long being somebody's something. Somebody's girlfriend. Somebody's wife. Somebody's daughter doing the expected thing. Somebody's sister. Theodore Nott, from the ancient and most noble house of Nott, who had waited six years without being asked to and three hundred and sixty two more days on top of that, had not the slightest interest in making her somebody new.
He wanted her to be Ginny Weasley.
Just Ginny Weasley.
Who happened, now, to be his.