Prologue
July 2019
I was seventeen when I did something no daughter should ever have to do. Even now, I carry it with me.
It was evening. I sat alone on the old garden swing, watching the last of the light disappear beyond the rooftops. A faint breeze stirred the freesias beside me. Mum had planted them years before, insisting they were hardier than they looked. She had been right. They returned every year without fail. I found myself wondering whether memory worked the same way, whether it could survive anything if the roots were deep enough.
Inside the house, Mum and Dad carried on with the ordinary rhythm of the evening. The clink of cutlery reached me through the open kitchen window. A cupboard door closed. Someone laughed. Everything sounded perfectly normal.
Neither of them knew what I had already done.
Or what it had cost me.
At the time, I told myself I was being sensible. That was the sort of conclusion I always reached after weighing every possibility I could think of. There had not been another solution. Not one that gave them any real chance of surviving what was coming.
I had gone over it so many times that I could have argued the case before Professor McGonagall herself.
Yet, as the shadows stretched across the lawn, my certainty began to slip.
Had I overlooked something? Had I dismissed another answer because it seemed impossible? I had always believed that if I studied hard enough, read enough, and thought long enough, I could find the correct solution. Books had taught me that every hard question had an answer waiting to be discovered.
War was proving otherwise.
You did the right thing, Hermione.
I repeated the words in my head because I needed to hear them.
They no longer sounded convincing.
There was no neat conclusion to reach. No comforting paragraph at the end of a chapter explaining why everything had happened as it should. My thoughts refused to settle. They circled the same questions until I could hardly tell one from another.
It happened during one of the darkest periods of my life. You-Know-Who had returned to power. The war had already begun, even if much of the non-magical world continued as though nothing had changed. Every week brought another disappearance, another family broken apart, another reminder that none of us were safe.
Harry and Ron did not know what I intended to do.
If they had, they would have tried to stop me.
Harry would have insisted there had to be another way. Ron would have looked horrified before arguing with me until one of us lost our temper. They would not have understood.
Not then.
Perhaps I would not have understood either if someone else had been making the choice.
But they were my parents.
They had no part in our war.
If You-Know-Who or the Death Eaters discovered who I was, Mum and Dad would become targets. They would never even understand why strangers wished them dead.
I could not allow that.
So I chose for them.
Even now, I believe it was necessary.
Knowing that has never made it hurt less.
It felt as though I had taken a piece of myself and locked it somewhere I could never reach again. There are wounds that heal because time passes. Others remain because they mark the person you become afterwards.
This was one of those.
I do not think about it every day.
Life has moved on. It had to. There was a war to survive, friends to protect, a future to build once the fighting ended.
Still, some evenings bring it all back without warning.
I am forty now.
I have reached the age Mum and Dad were that summer.
I used to think growing older might soften the memory. It has not. I remember everything with uncomfortable clarity. The breeze against my face. The smell of the flowers. The sound of plates being cleared from the table. The last look Mum gave me before it happened.
She smiled at me.
She had no idea she was looking at her daughter for the last time.
For years, I wished I could separate the guilt from the pride.
I never managed it.
If I am proud, it is because I loved them enough to let them lose me.
If I grieve, it is for exactly the same reason.
One cannot exist without the other.
That summer changed every part of my life. It taught me that courage is not always loud. Sometimes it asks you to make a choice that no one will praise because no one can ever know what it cost.
When the world grows quiet and the evening light begins to fade, I sometimes find myself back in that garden.
I think of Mum.
I think of Dad.
I remember how fiercely I loved them.
Then I am seventeen again.
My hair refuses to stay where I left it. My hands are not quite steady, however much I tell myself they are. My heart beats so hard that I can feel it in my throat.
I am frightened.
I am determined.
That is when it all returns.
What I did.
And what happened next.
