Chapter 1: The Pity Potatoes
There is a particular look that Molly Weasley gives you when she has decided you are not eating enough, and a different look, softer and far worse, for when she has decided you are lonely. I got the second one over the roast potatoes.
"More gravy, Hermione, love?"
"I'm fine, thank you."
"You're looking thin."
"I'm the same weight I was at Easter."
"Well," said Molly, and put three more potatoes on my plate anyway, the way other people might lay flowers on a grave.
Across the table, Ginny caught my eye and grimaced in sympathy. Harry was very busy cutting his beef. Ron, who had been perfectly lovely about the whole thing for two years now, was perfectly lovely again, which was the problem. He had brought Marigold, who played Keeper for the Holyhead Harpies reserves and laughed at all his jokes with her entire body, and every time she did it George looked at me, and every time George looked at me, Molly reached for the potatoes.
I am not lonely. I want to be clear about that. I have a flat in Islington with good light and a cat who tolerates me, and a job at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement where I am, without false modesty, the reason three separate pieces of legislation exist. I have friends. I have a standing Thursday reservation at a Muggle Thai place where the waiter knows my order. I read in the bath. I am, by any reasonable measure, a woman whose life is full.
It is simply that the Weasleys measure a full life in plus-ones.
"So," said Arthur, with the brave cheer of a man changing the subject towards a cliff, "the Victory Gala. Everyone going?"
"Ministry's making it a big one this year," said Percy. "Eight years. The Minister wants a show of unity."
"Marigold's coming with me," Ron said, and Marigold laughed as if that were a joke, and Molly turned to me with the potato spoon still in her hand.
"And you'll come with us, dear, won't you? Arthur and I would love to have you on our arm. You shouldn't have to walk in on your own."
There was a short, awful pause, the kind that happens in families when everyone agrees with what has been said and is embarrassed that it was said aloud.
I had walked in on my own last year. And the year before. Both times I had spent the evening being steered by kind people towards widowers and second cousins, and once, memorably, towards Cormac McLaggen, who had spent twenty minutes explaining my own Elf Welfare Act to me and then asked if I'd ever considered growing my hair out.
"Actually," I said, "I have a date."
Ginny put down her fork.
Here is what I'd like to say happened next: that I produced the name of an attractive, age-appropriate wizard of good character, everyone was pleased, and I went home and found one. What happened instead was that every eye at the table swung to me, Ginny said "Who?" in the voice she uses for opposing Chasers, and my brain, reaching wildly for any male name that wasn't a Weasley, closed its fist around the last one it had shouted at.
"Malfoy," I said.
I had shouted at him that morning, in fairness, for a good reason.
He'd come into my office at ten past nine with a stack of import permits for something called Malfoy Botanicals, Ltd., which he had apparently been running for four years out of a warehouse in Deptford, and which needed a Class C licence to bring in dried Fwooper feathers from Senegal. The licence had been denied twice. He wanted to know why. I had told him that the Department did not discuss the status of applications with applicants who came up to the fourth floor without an appointment, and he had told me that he had written for an appointment nine times and he was beginning to suspect someone in my office used his letters to light their pipe.
He was right, as it turned out. Not about the pipe. Desmond Pyle in Permits had been binning anything with the Malfoy crest on it since 1999 and calling it "risk management." I found nine of the letters in a drawer while Malfoy stood in my doorway in a charcoal coat with his arms folded, radiating a sort of icy, well-tailored I-told-you-so.
"I'll have it looked at," I'd said.
"You'll have it looked at." He'd repeated it like a man tasting a wine he'd been warned about. "That's gracious, Granger."
"It's what I can do this morning."
"It's what you can do any morning. That's rather my point." And then, because he is himself and cannot help it, "Do you want to know how many suppliers have stopped selling to me this year? Seven. Not because my money's no good. Because nobody wants to be in the Prophet's business pages next to my surname. Four years of clean accounts, and I'm still the boy with the arm."
He hadn't said it bitterly, which made it worse. He'd said it the way you'd read out a weather report. I had looked at him properly for the first time in a long time, at the faint shadow under his eyes and the cuffs of his shirt, which were very good shirt cuffs and very slightly frayed.
"I said I'll have it looked at," I'd said again, more quietly, and he'd nodded once and gone, and I'd sat in my office for ten minutes being furious at Desmond Pyle and also, obscurely, at myself.
So when the Weasley table turned to me with all its loving, ruthless attention, his was the name on the top of the pile.
"Malfoy," Ron repeated.
"Draco Malfoy?" said Percy, as if there were a spare.
"Yes," I said, because the only way out of a lie is through it. "We've been talking. About his business. It's a work thing, and then it isn't, and it's very new, so I'd rather not discuss it."
George put his chin in his hand and looked at me with enormous delight. Harry, who has known me since a train compartment and a lost toad, and who can tell exactly when I am lying because my left eyebrow does something I have never been able to stop, very slowly put a whole potato in his mouth so that he would not have to speak.
"Oh," said Molly faintly. "Well. That's. Lovely, dear."
"He's very tall," Marigold offered.
I spent the evening composing letters in my head. Dear Malfoy, you will not believe this. Dear Malfoy, I'd like to propose an arrangement. Dear Malfoy, I have done something unforgivably stupid and I need you to be a gentleman about it, which I recognise is a lot to ask of you specifically.
In the end I didn't write. I went to Deptford.
Malfoy Botanicals turned out to be a former rope works by the river with a newly painted door and a smell, when you got close, of crushed mint and something darker and peppery, like the inside of a pepper grinder. A bell rang when I pushed in. Shelves went up into the dark, labelled in a neat, slanting hand: Asphodel, root, powdered. Lovage, wild. Dittany, Cretan, NOT the Welsh rubbish. At the back, under a hanging lamp, Draco Malfoy was sitting at a scarred workbench with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, writing in a ledger. The Dark Mark was a grey smudge on his left forearm, faded like an old bruise. He didn't cover it when he saw me. I liked him slightly more for that, and resented liking him, and decided to start with the resentment.
"I've come about your licence," I said.
He put the quill down. "On a Sunday. In person." His mouth did something sardonic. "I'm honoured, or I'm being arrested."
"Neither. Pyle's been suspended pending review. Your application's been moved to my desk. You'll have an answer on Wednesday."
He went very still. "Is that a yes?"
"It's an answer on Wednesday. I don't make decisions over a workbench."
"No," he said slowly, "but you came all the way to Deptford to tell me you'd make one. Which means you want something." He leaned back on his stool. "Go on. I'm fascinated."
There is no dignified way to say the next part. I tried several in my head and then just said it.
"I told the Weasleys I'm taking you to the Victory Gala."
The silence went on long enough for me to read three shelf labels.
"Why," he said at last, very carefully, "would you do that?"
"Because they were going to make me go with Molly and Arthur, and I panicked, and you'd annoyed me that morning, so you were," I made a vague gesture, "available. In my mind."
"I was available in your mind."
"Don't."
"No, I want to sit with this. Hermione Granger, Order of Merlin, First Class, terror of the Wizengamot, panicked at a Sunday lunch and said my name." He looked genuinely, horribly pleased. "Do they believe you?"
"Harry doesn't. The rest of them are trying to."
He stood up and came around the bench. He's always been tall, but I'd forgotten that he moves like it costs him nothing, like the floor was laid for him. He stopped at a polite distance and looked down at me with those cold grey eyes that turn out, under a working lamp, to be not so cold, just tired and very sharp.
"And if I say no?"
"Then I'll tell them it ended. Quickly and amicably. You'll never hear about it again."
"And if I say yes?"
"Then you get to walk into the Ministry's biggest night of the year with a war heroine on your arm," I said, "in front of every investor, supplier and Prophet photographer in Britain. And I suspect, Malfoy, that that's worth rather more to you than a licence."
I watched him do the arithmetic. It didn't take long. He'd always been quick, which was the most irritating thing about him at school and remained the most irritating thing about him now.
"You've thought about this," he said.
"I had a whole bus ride."
"You took the bus to Deptford."
"I like the bus."
Something flickered across his face, a small surprised amusement that he put away almost before I'd seen it. Then he held out his hand.
"One evening," he said.
"One evening." I shook it. His palm was warm and dry and calloused across the base of the fingers, from knives, I supposed, or from pestles. Not the hand of a man who'd done nothing for eight years. "And there are conditions."
"Of course there are." He let go and went back to his bench, pulled a fresh sheet of parchment from under the ledger, dipped his quill, and looked at me expectantly. "Dictate. I'll want a copy for my solicitor."
"You don't have a solicitor."
"I have a very aggressive accountant. She'll do."
So I dictated. He wrote it all down in that slanting hand without a single complaint, which was suspicious in itself, and when I'd finished he read it back to me in a flat clerk's voice.
"One. The arrangement lasts for the duration of the Victory Gala and no longer. Two. Public displays of affection limited to hand-holding, one dance, and a hand at the small of the back, which you've specified must be," he squinted, "'respectful.' Three. No discussion of the war. Four. No discussion of Weasley. Five. I am not to call you 'Granger' in front of anyone who might report it. Six. You are not to call me 'ferret' in front of anyone at all. Seven. Neither party is to tell anyone the arrangement is fake. Eight. Neither party is to fall," he paused, and his eyebrow went up, "'into any sort of feeling,' and I'm quoting you directly there, Granger, because I want it on the record that you said it, not me."
"Read the last one."
"Nine. Separate taxis home." He looked up. "Taxis."
"Muggle cabs. Apparating in heels after champagne is how people splinch. I've seen the St Mungo's statistics."
"Of course you have." He signed the bottom with a flourish and turned the parchment around for me to do the same. As I bent over it, he said, in a lighter voice than he'd used all night, "One note, if I'm allowed."
I looked up. He was watching me with an expression I couldn't read, which I didn't like, because I can read most people.
"What?"
"Rule seven." He tapped it. "Nobody can know. That includes Potter, I assume. He's the one who'll come for me first."
"Harry already knows I lied."
"Harry knows you lied about having a date," Malfoy said. "He doesn't know whether you were lying about it being me." He slid the quill across. "So for the next fortnight, Granger, you and I are going to have to convince the Chosen One, his terrifying wife, the entire Weasley clan and the Daily Prophet that you, of your own free will, have fallen for me."
I signed. My handwriting came out smaller than usual.
"How hard can it be," I said.
He smiled then, a real one, slow and crooked, and I realised with a sinking feeling that I had never once, in all the years I'd known him, seen Draco Malfoy smile at me like he meant it.
"Oh," he said, "I think you're about to find out."