Chapter 1: Waiting Room
The papers are already drawn up. I know, because I drafted them.
Nine pages, two signatures, a schedule of assets that took me an afternoon. The house on Doughty Street to him, since he bought it. The library to me, since I filled it. The cat, after some correspondence, to me. He wanted nothing else, and I wanted nothing at all, and Mrs. Agatha Pembury of Pembury and Vane, Magical Family Law, had looked at my draft over her half-moon spectacles three weeks ago and said, "This is very tidy, Mrs. Malfoy," in the tone of a woman who had seen a great many tidy divorces and believed in none of them.
Her waiting room is on the second floor of a building in Chancery Lane that Muggles think is a firm of loss adjusters. There's a green leather sofa, a rubber plant that has been charmed to stay alive past all reason, and a long window running with rain. There's a clock that strikes the quarter hours in a voice like a disappointed aunt.
And there's Draco.
He came in at five to four, shaking water off a black umbrella, and stopped dead in the doorway when he saw me, as if he'd forgotten I'd be here. As if the whole point of the afternoon weren't the two of us in the same room for the last time. Then he said, "Granger," and I said, "Malfoy," and he sat at the far end of the sofa with a full cushion between us. We have been looking at the rubber plant for forty minutes.
It's raining the way London rains in November, steadily, sideways, as though it has a grievance. His hair is wet at the ends. It falls into his eyes when it's wet. I used to push it back for him in the mornings, standing in the hall while he looked for his keys, and he used to let me and pretend to be annoyed. I don't know why I'm thinking about that. I'm thinking about the rubber plant.
"She's late," he says.
"She's coming from the Wizengamot. They sit until four on Thursdays."
"You'd know."
I would. I spent most of this autumn in front of them, arguing the repeal clause by clause. Draco came to the final reading. I saw him in the gallery, at the back, in this same coat. He left before the vote. I've never asked him why, and he's never said, and that's a fair summary of our marriage.
The clock strikes the quarter. A paper memo comes fluttering in under the door, folds itself into a small purple bird and lands on the arm of the sofa between us.
He opens it, because he's closer. "Unavoidably detained. Back by six. Help yourselves to tea. A.P." He looks at the sideboard, where a pot is already steaming itself. "She's very sure of us."
"She's billing us for this."
"Of course she is." He gets up and pours two cups without asking how I take it. He doesn't need to ask. He puts mine on the low table nearer to my end than his, and I watch his hands. Long fingers, potion-stained at the nails. The ring.
He's still wearing the ring.
I look at it for too long and he notices, and he sits back down and puts that hand in his coat pocket, and neither of us says anything at all.
We were married in the Ministry's Atrium on a Tuesday in June, by a junior wizard with a cold, along with eleven other couples. I wore a dress I bought in Marks and Spencer and he wore black, as though for a funeral, which Ron said was fitting and Harry told him to shut up. Narcissa came. My parents didn't, because they still don't know me, and the Ministry form had no box for that. Draco signed his name, then turned the parchment so I could sign mine, and his hand was steady and mine wasn't, and he put his over it for a second, just a second, and took it away.
That was the first time he touched me. The second was on our wedding night, when he stood at the door of the bedroom in Doughty Street and said, "I'll take the spare room. Nothing in the law says otherwise," and I said, "I know what the law says, I've read it," and he said, "Of course you have," and the corner of his mouth went up, and I realised I didn't want him to go to the spare room.
He didn't, in the end. Not that night, and not for months after.
It was the only part of us that ever worked without effort. Everywhere else we were careful. Polite at breakfast. Separate at dinner, most nights, because I worked late and he worked later. We talked about the cat and the post and his mother's health. But in the dark we were honest, or something close to it, and I used to think that was enough to build on. I thought we were building.
Then his father died in Azkaban in March, and Draco went somewhere I couldn't follow. He stopped talking, even in the dark. He started sleeping in the spare room after all. When the year was up and the dissolution forms arrived from the Ministry, he left them on the kitchen table where I'd see them, and I took that as an answer, and I moved out in April.
I've had eight months to decide whether I was right. I'm still deciding.
At six there's another memo. It flies in on a gust from nowhere and he catches it one-handed, the way he used to catch the Snitch, and I look away.
"The storm's closed the Floo network across central London," he reads. "Can't get back tonight. Papers must be signed in my presence under section nine. Tomorrow, nine sharp. Apologies. A.P." He looks up. "Section nine?"
"Witnessed signature," I say. "I put it in."
"Of course you did."
The building's wards don't allow Apparition; I knew that, because Pembury's letter said so, and he knew it, because he'd come in with an umbrella. Outside it's full dark and the rain is coming down in sheets, gutters overflowing, black cabs throwing up wings of water. The nearest Apparition point is behind the Royal Courts of Justice, a quarter mile off, and on a night like this it'll be a pond.
My flat is in Hackney. I'd be soaked to the skin in a minute.
"The house is ten minutes," Draco says, to the window.
I don't answer.
"Your things are still there. Some of them. You left half the wardrobe." He turns. His face is the careful face, the one he used at breakfast for a year. "You can take the spare room. I'll see you back here at nine and we'll sign and you'll never have to look at my umbrella again."
"I like your umbrella."
"You've always had terrible taste."
"I married you."
"Under duress," he says. "That doesn't count." But he holds out his hand for my coat.
It isn't ten minutes. It's fourteen, because the rain is so heavy we have to stop under the arch at Gray's Inn, pressed back against the wet stone while a bus goes past and throws half the gutter at our ankles. The umbrella is not built for two. He holds it over me and gets drenched down one side, and I tell him not to be ridiculous and he tells me to be quiet, and I step closer so we'll both fit, and then I'm against his chest.
He smells the same. Cedar, and the green bitter smell of the potions he spends his days patenting, and rain. I'm looking at his collar. I can feel him breathing.
"Granger," he says, very low.
I look up. Water's dripping off the end of his nose. His eyes are dark in the streetlight. He looks at my mouth, the way he used to at the end of a long day, before he'd say something dry and kiss me in the hall with his keys still in his hand. I know that look. I've missed that look more than I've let myself admit to anyone.
He doesn't kiss me. He breathes out, and lifts the umbrella, and says, "Bus has gone. Come on," and we run the last two streets.
Doughty Street is narrow and Georgian and rain-black, and number forty-eight has the same blue door. He gets it open on the second try. The hall light comes on. The cat, Bartleby, looks at me from the stairs with his great yellow eyes and says nothing at all, which is the most cutting thing he could do.
Nothing's moved. My green umbrella is in the stand. My reading glasses are on the hall table where I left them in April, folded on top of a stack of post. There's a pair of my slippers under the radiator.
"You didn't clear anything," I say.
"I didn't want to throw away things you might want back." He's hanging up our coats, not looking at me. "Towels in the airing cupboard. You know where. The spare room's made up."
I go up the stairs. I mean to go into the spare room. I stop on the landing instead, because the door to the main bedroom is open, and on the back of it, on the brass hook, my dressing gown is hanging. The blue one with the frayed belt. Exactly where I left it. Not in a box, not in a drawer. On the hook, as though I'd be needing it in the morning.
I hear him come up behind me and stop.
"Draco," I say, without turning round. "I don't want the spare room."