Chapter 1: Thursdays
On Thursdays I lie to everyone before breakfast.
I lie to my mother, who asks over the marmalade whether I'll be at the St Mungo's benefit committee again this afternoon, and I say yes, it's the seating plan, it's a nightmare, Mrs Greengrass won't sit near the Flints. I lie to the house-elf who asks if Mistress will want luncheon. I lie to my reflection, which is the easiest of all, because I've had twenty-eight years of practice and my reflection has never once called me on it.
At noon I lie to Adrian.
He floos through for coffee, as he does every Thursday, because his mother has told him it's important to be seen to call on one's fiancée, and Adrian Pucey always does what is important. He kisses my cheek. He tells me about a Gringotts bond issue. He is kind, and handsome, and so dull I sometimes forget, mid-sentence, that he is in the room. He asks whether I've thought any more about the flowers, and I say white roses, and he says, "Lovely, whatever you like, Draconia," and I could scream.
Then he goes, and I go upstairs and change.
The dress is Muggle, blue, bought in a shop in Milsom Street on a Thursday four months ago. I keep it at the back of the wardrobe behind my riding things. I put on flat shoes, because the hill is steep, and a camel coat, and I take the pins out of my hair and leave it down, which no one at Malfoy Manor has seen me do in years. I look in the glass. A tall, pale, fair woman in a blue dress looks back, and she could be anyone.
I Disapparate from the end of the yew walk, and I don't let myself smile until I'm gone.
Bath smells of wet stone and the river.
I arrive in an alley behind the Abbey where nobody ever goes, and I walk out into the Thursday crowds, the tourists and the buskers and the coach parties from Swindon, and nobody looks at me twice. I love that more than I can say. In wizarding London I can't buy a quill without someone whispering behind their hand: *Malfoy. The daughter. Wasn't she...?* Here I'm just in the way of someone's photograph.
I buy a bun from the old timbered shop on the corner, as I always do. Then I walk up. Up Milsom Street, past the shops, up Gay Street, which I've never been able to say with a straight face, into the great stone ring of the Circus, where the plane trees are just coming into leaf and the houses curve round in a perfect circle the colour of honey. The light in Bath does something to stone. It makes it look warm even in March. I've never once seen a house at home look warm.
The hotel is a little way beyond, on a quiet crescent, a tall terrace of Georgian windows with a black door and a brass bell. The woman on the desk knows me as Mrs Black. It amused him, the first time, that I chose that. It amused me less than I pretended.
"Afternoon, Mrs Black. He's already up."
He's always already up.
The room is on the top floor, at the back, under the roof, with a sloping ceiling and a window seat that looks out over the slate roofs to the green hills beyond the city. The wallpaper has birds on it. The bed is an old brass one that creaks. There's a kettle on a tray and a basket of tiny packets of biscuits, and a print of the Pump Room on the wall that's slightly crooked, and every single Thursday he has straightened it, and every single Thursday somebody from housekeeping has put it crooked again.
He's on the window seat, reading. He doesn't look up when I come in. He makes me wait while he finishes his page, and I stand in the doorway in my camel coat with a paper bag in my hand and let him, because it's the only moment of the week where anyone makes me wait for anything, and I've come to need it.
Then he puts the book face-down on his knee and looks at me.
Harry Potter is twenty-eight and has stopped wearing his glasses the way he wore them at the trials, like a disguise. He wears them now as if he forgot they were there. His hair is still impossible. There's grey at his temple, just a thread, that he doesn't know about and that I'll never tell him about, because I like knowing something about him that he doesn't. He wears Muggle clothes on Thursdays, too: dark jeans, an old blue shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. His forearms are the most indecent thing I have ever seen.
"You're late," he says.
"Three minutes."
"Four." He holds out his hand. "Did you bring me a bun?"
"I brought *me* a bun. You can have half if you're nice."
"I'm always nice."
"You are almost never nice," I say, and cross the room, and give him the paper bag, and he catches my wrist instead of taking it.
This is how it started.
Eight months ago, the week my mother and Adrian's mother agreed the match over sherry, I couldn't breathe. I mean that literally. I'd go to stand up from a chair, or turn a page, and my chest would lock as if someone had put a Body-Bind on just that one part of me. I went to a Healer. She said there was nothing wrong. I went to a second, who said the same and suggested I take some air.
So I took some air. I went as far as I could think of from anywhere a witch would ever look for me, which turned out to be a teashop in the Pump Room in Bath, with a string trio playing Elgar very badly and a fountain of warm, foul-tasting spa water in the corner. I sat at a table under a chandelier and ordered a pot of Earl Grey and burst into tears into it in front of two hundred tourists.
A man at the next table handed me a napkin without looking up from his newspaper.
I knew the hand before I knew the face. I'd watched it in a courtroom hold a wand up to swear on, and then point across the room at my mother and say, *She lied to his face to save me. You should let her go.*
"Potter," I said, appalled, through the napkin.
He looked up. He looked at me for a long moment. And then Harry Potter said, very quietly, "Bloody hell. You too?"
He'd broken up with someone that week. It had been in the *Prophet*, and on the wireless, and on the front of *Witch Weekly* with a heart drawn through the middle of his face, and he'd been followed by three photographers to a Muggle supermarket in Islington, where he'd hidden behind the frozen peas. So he'd got on a train at Paddington, a Muggle train, and got off at the first place he'd never been and sat down in the first place he could get tea.
We drank the tea. Then we walked down to the river and drank gin in a pub with low beams, and talked about everything except why we were there. At eleven o'clock, on the pavement outside, he said, "Well," and I said, "Well," and then I said, before I'd decided to, "Next Thursday?"
He looked at me with those terrible green eyes and said, "Next Thursday."
That was all, the first time. A drink. The second Thursday, too. On the third, it rained, and he'd taken a room because he'd missed the last train, and I went up to dry my coat, and I didn't come down again until morning.
We made rules. I'm a Malfoy; of course we made rules. Thursdays only. Never Wednesday, never Friday, never a letter or an owl between. Never at home. We don't use names in the street. We don't talk about Adrian, or my mother, or anyone he's seeing, or the Ministry, or anything at all that happens on the other six days. Above all, we don't talk about the future.
He's kept every one of them for eight months. That's the thing that frightens me.
He has my wrist. He pulls me down onto the window seat, and the bun goes onto the floor, and I let it.
He kisses me the way he always does on Thursdays, at the start, as if it's been longer than a week, as if he's been rationing himself, which perhaps he has. Slow. Thorough. His hand goes into my hair, which I wore down for exactly this, and he makes a sound against my mouth when he finds it loose, a low pleased sound that I've been thinking about since last Thursday, and the Thursday before, and every day in between.
"I hate this coat," he murmurs.
"It's cashmere."
"I hate it in cashmere." He pushes it off my shoulders. I let it fall. He finds the zip at the back of the blue dress and draws it down, slowly, his knuckles sliding down my spine one bone at a time, and I shiver and press closer, and he laughs very softly into my neck.
"What?"
"You're in the blue one," he says. "You always wear the blue one when you've had a bad week."
I go still. I didn't know that. I didn't know he knew that.
"That's against the rules," I say.
"What is?"
"Noticing things about the rest of the week."
"I'm not," he says. "I'm noticing things about Thursdays." He draws back to look at me, the dress slipping off my shoulders, the afternoon light coming through the window onto both of us. His thumb strokes once, very gently, along my collarbone. "It was bad, wasn't it? This week."
I could tell him. About the white roses and the bond issue and the seating plans, and the way my mother looked at me over the marmalade this morning, as if she knew something and was too frightened to say it. I could tell him that the Puceys set the date on Tuesday. That I'm getting married in six weeks, in the garden at the Manor, under an arch of white roses I chose because I couldn't think of anything else.
I don't. I kiss him instead. I kiss him until he stops asking, and pushes the dress down to my waist, and puts his mouth on the curve of my breast, and I stop thinking about anything but the slope of the ceiling and the creak of the window seat and his breath, warm and uneven, against my skin.
It's a long time before either of us speaks again.
Afterwards, he's lying on his back in the brass bed with one arm behind his head, and I'm drawing shapes on his chest with one finger, and the light outside the window has gone gold and low over the hills. It's the best hour of the week. I don't let myself think about the train he'll catch or the Apparition point by the Abbey.
"I've got something to tell you," he says to the ceiling. "And it's against the rules. So you can stop me if you want."
My finger goes still.
"Kingsley called me in on Monday," he says. "He wants me to take a job personally. Close protection for a society wedding. Under-Secretary's son, apparently, so the Minister wants his best man on the gate." He turns his head on the pillow and looks at me. His face is very calm. His eyes aren't. "Pucey-Malfoy. The garden at the Manor. The third of May."
I don't say anything. I can't.
"I said yes," Harry says. "I didn't know what else to say. I thought, if I said no, they'd send someone else, and I'd have to read about it in the *Prophet*." He reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, very carefully, as if I might break. "So I'll be there. On the gate. In my dress robes. Watching you walk past me to marry him."
Outside, the Abbey bells start to ring for six.
"You were going to tell me," he says. It isn't a question. "When were you going to tell me?"