The Way Back to Us

There are questions one can avoid for years.

Can a person truly change?

Can the habits formed in childhood be broken, or do they merely grow quieter with age?

And if you have spent the better part of your life believing you understand yourself, what happens when the person who has known you longest begins to see you differently?

I have been attempting to ignore those questions for some time. Unfortunately, they have proved rather persistent.

Tonight, I enjoy the distinct advantage of darkness, cold air, and a sleeping wife who cannot interrupt my thoughts.

It is well past midnight. The house is quiet, apart from the grandfather clock in the hall and the occasional rustle of leaves beyond the garden wall. Somewhere near the flowerbeds, a moth has taken a particular interest in one of the enchanted lanterns, throwing itself against the glass with relentless, foolish devotion.

I suppose there are worse ways to spend the final hours of a day.

October has brought a proper chill with it. I came outside without a proper cloak, clad only in my dressing gown—an arrangement that seemed entirely reasonable when I left the bedroom, and considerably less so now.

I keep my hands jammed deep into my pockets and survey the garden.

The wards surrounding the property are invisible, as they ought to be, though I still inspect them before retiring for the night.

Old habits die hard, if they die at all.

A Muggle passing along the lane would see merely an old house, a sprawling garden, and perhaps a few soft lights in the windows. Nothing remarkable.

They would not see the boundary charms woven into the stone wall.

They would not feel the anti-intrusion enchantments waiting beneath the ground.

They would certainly not know that the weather vane above the slate roof is more than mere decoration; if someone crossed the outer boundary without permission, it would emit a shriek sharp enough to wake half the village.

Hermione considers my security measures excessive.

She informs me I still reason like someone anticipating another war.

She isn’t entirely wrong.

However, as I have always maintained, excessive is infinitely preferable to dead.

She usually rolls her eyes at that sentiment.

I find, unexpectedly, that I miss it.

It is an odd detail to miss, I admit.

Not one of the grand, celebrated milestones of our marriage—not an anniversary, a holiday, or some significant occasion captured in a moving photograph.

Simply her rolling her eyes at me.

There was a time when I believed I could predict her reactions to nearly anything I said.

Perhaps that was part of the underlying difficulty.

Arrogance has always been a Malfoy specialty, even when we flatter ourselves into believing we have cured the condition.

The sky is clear tonight.

The stars are sharper this far from the estate at Alderwick, though I have never taken much of a personal interest in astronomy. Hogwarts taught us enough to pass our examinations, and at seventeen, I had no intention of learning more than was strictly necessary to outshine Granger on a paper.

Yet I find myself looking upward now.

I did not always do so.

Years ago, I returned to Hogwarts for the first time as an adult and stood alone in the Great Hall after the evening’s proceedings had concluded. The enchanted ceiling above was rendering a clear night sky, identical to this one.

I remember looking up and realizing, with a sudden, sharp pang of embarrassment, how little attention I had paid to it as a boy.

I had spent seven years beneath that magnificent ceiling complaining about the food, the draughts, the professors, and the insufferable occupants of the Gryffindor table.

I had never once thought to wonder how many nights I had spent sitting beneath those stars without actually seeing them.

Age does that to a man.

It makes certain truths visible.

Or perhaps it merely makes it impossible to go on ignoring what was present all along.

My wand is another example.

I have carried it for most of my life. Hawthorn. Unicorn hair. Ten inches. It has darkened with age, softened by decades of oils from my skin, bearing the subtle scratches of constant use.

Occasionally, I take it from its dragon-hide case and recall the afternoon I first held it at Ollivanders. My parents were both present, yet it is curious what memory chooses to preserve.

My father’s expression comes back first.

Not pride—never pride.

Expectation.

Lucius Malfoy had never entertained a single doubt regarding what his son ought to become, and whether I agreed with him was a matter of total irrelevance.

For a long time, I believed him.

Then I think of my mother.

There are memories of Narcissa that I carried for years without properly understanding their weight.

One belongs to the night she stood before the Dark Lord in the Forbidden Forest and lied straight to his face.

She had been sent to discover whether Potter was dead.

Instead, she asked whether I was alive.

That was all that mattered to her. I understood the gravity of it far too late.

She possessed no guarantee the deception would work. No certainty he wouldn’t see straight through her Occlumency. No assurance that she would survive the next ten seconds if he discovered her betrayal.

I was far too young, far too terrified, to grasp the full extent of what she had risked.

Even now, decades later, I can look at my mother sitting in her drawing room, complaining about the quality of the tea or sharply correcting a house-elf, and suddenly recall that moment.

She lied to the Dark Lord for her son.

Knowing a fact and truly understanding it are entirely different matters.

Perhaps that is why I have never been comfortable with the reassuring little notion that people remain the same.

I certainly have not.

Whether that makes me a better man is a question I prefer not to inspect too closely.

Hermione has accused me of being sentimental exactly twice in our life together.

Both occasions involved rare, centuries-old manuscripts.

I maintain, with absolute conviction, that she was mistaken.

I do not write poetry.

I do not collect romantic trinkets.

I have never understood why anyone voluntarily watches a Muggle film lasting three hours when the narrative is blatantly designed to force a room full of adults to weep.

I prefer things that can be examined.

Objects can be handled.

Charms can be tested.

Curses can be systematically identified.

An artefact either contains an enchantment or it does not.

People, I’m afraid, are rarely so straightforward.

For most of my adult life, I have worked with magical artefacts and antiquities. I examine objects recovered from ancient wizarding estates, authenticate pieces whose histories have been disputed for generations, and determine whether an item is genuinely valuable or merely an expensive piece of dark rubbish.

It suits me.

Old objects do not pretend to be something they are not. They carry their history plainly, etched into the grain or bound in the magic. Objects cannot disappoint you, which makes them vastly easier to live with.

Hermione has always been quick to point out that people are not artefacts.

She has been correct more often than I care to admit to her face.

Our marriage has endured a great deal.

Twenty-nine years.

When I speak the length of it aloud to the empty garden, it sounds heavy with everything we have packed into those years.

We have buried people we loved. We have watched our parents grow frail. We have sat beside hospital beds at St. Mungo’s through agonizing, grey dawn hours, listening to Healers offer polished assurances that they were doing everything within their power.

And, of course, we raised our children.

For two decades, this house seemed utterly incapable of silence.

There were school robes abandoned on staircases, stray parchment beneath the dining table, half-finished Arithmancy essays on the kitchen counter, and owls arriving at the most absurd hours imaginable. Someone was always loudly searching for a missing book, a misplaced wand, or something they insisted had been stolen by a sibling when it was sitting in plain sight beneath their own bed.

There were mornings when I walked downstairs to discover an active, bubbling cauldron in the kitchen that I had no recollection of purchasing.

There were evenings when someone hexed a bedroom door shut from the inside because, apparently, expecting a teenager to tolerate a polite knock had become an entirely unreasonable demand.

Then our children became teenagers.

I shall not elaborate.

Some experiences are better left out of the historical record, if only to preserve what little dignity I have remaining as a father.

Through all of it, Hermione and I remained together.

That does not mean we were always happy, nor does it mean the domestic peace was uninterrupted.

We argued, naturally.

We had silences that stretched on for days, lasting far longer than they should have.

There were mornings when I left for the Ministry without saying goodbye because the previous evening had ended in an icy deadlock, and nights when we slept on opposite sides of the bed, pretending the vast distance between us was merely the fault of an unnecessarily large mattress.

There were entire years when work, children, aging parents, and the relentless, ordinary business of keeping a household running consumed every available inch of our lives.

We stopped asking certain questions because arrogance led us to believe we already knew the answers.

How was your day?

Are you all right?

Do you require anything?

Do you wish to talk?

I loved Hermione through every iteration of our marriage.

That is the part I have always found difficult to articulate.

I loved her when she annoyed me—especially then, perhaps, though I would rather swallow glass than admit it to Potter.

I loved the woman who could badger Ministry officials with terrifying precision until they eventually caved and admitted she was right.

I loved the woman who could disappear into a dusty tome and forget that dinner existed entirely.

I loved the woman who grew quietly furious whenever one of our children was treated unfairly, spending the next several hours methodically ensuring that something was done about it.

I loved her.

I simply assumed she knew.

Looking back, that assumption seems blindingly, egregiously foolish.

I believed it did not require stating.

I thought our shared life was evidence enough.

I was wrong.

I discovered precisely how wrong fourteen months ago.

The event itself was so utterly mundane that, told without context, it would hardly sound worthy of a story.

No scandal, no affair, no dark curse, no tragedy. I did not do anything dramatic enough to warrant a line in the Daily Prophet.

I forgot something.

Something small.

Something that should have been impossible for me to forget.

It was August 2025.

I remember the date with painful clarity now; I certainly did not remember it then.

That morning began like hundreds before it.

I rose before Hermione, shaved, dressed, and descended the stairs. Breakfast was warming beneath a Stasis Charm, and a Ministry owl was waiting on the dining table with a fresh stack of parchment from my office.

I went to work.

The Department of Magical Artefacts was unusually chaotic, which almost always meant another office had botched an intake. I cannot recall what had caused the backlog itself. I remember only an ancient piece from a Wiltshire estate, an insufferable disagreement over its provenance, and four tedious hours spent explaining to a pretentious collector that a seventeenth-century goblin-made reliquary was not worth a fraction of what he believed. It was vastly overpriced rubbish.

By the time I returned home, the details of the day had mostly evaporated from my mind.

Hermione was in the kitchen.

I noticed the smell before I saw her—she had prepared my favourite meal.

I remember smiling.

I remember stepping up to kiss her cheek.

I remember asking, with polite interest, whether her day had been difficult.

What I failed to remember was paying attention to the way she looked at me when I came through the door.

I was carrying my briefcase.

Nothing else.

At the time, I thought nothing of it.

We ate together.

Afterwards, Hermione collected the plates and retreated to the kitchen while I retrieved a small silver object from my briefcase and retired to my study. It was no larger than my palm, covered in runes worn almost smooth by centuries of handling. I had spent the better part of a week attempting to trace its origin.

I was examining its rim beneath a magnifying charm when Hermione appeared in the doorway.

She was holding a tea towel.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

Neither of us spoke for a long moment.

Then she said quietly, “Is there something you’re supposed to be telling me?”

I frowned. My mind raced through a mental inventory.

Work? Nothing.

The children? Nothing.

Her parents? Nothing.

I looked at her hair.

That was usually a safe place to start; I had learned that sudden changes to Hermione’s hair could be significant, and failing to notice them often resulted in a conversation for which I was thoroughly unprepared.

There was nothing unusual.

At least, nothing my eyes could discern.

“What?” I asked.

Her expression shifted—just a fraction. “Never mind.”

She turned and walked away down the corridor.

I watched her go. I should have followed her. I should have set the silver object down, walked into the hall, and asked her what was wrong. Instead, I turned back to my desk and resumed my work.

I have revisited that moment a hundred times since.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care—I cared immensely.

I simply lacked the sense to understand what I was looking at.

That night, we went to bed.

I remember settling beneath the duvet, still running calculations about the silver piece in my head.

Hermione turned her back to me.

For several minutes, the room was entirely silent save for our breathing.

Then I heard her inhale.

Once.

Sharply.

I opened my eyes.

She did it again.

I sat up, a cold knot forming in my stomach. “Hermione?”

She didn’t answer. Her shoulders quivered slightly.

I realised she was crying.

In my life, I have faced threats considerably more dangerous than tears, but there are few things more deeply unsettling than hearing your wife weep in the dark when you have no idea why.

My mind immediately leapt to catastrophe.

Her parents.

The children.

St. Mungo’s.

A sudden diagnosis.

A terrible letter.

Some nightmare that had struck while my back was turned.

I shifted closer and rested a hand against her back. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

She pulled the covers tighter around her chin.

The silence stretched between us, thick and suffocating.

Then, barely above a whisper, she said, “Happy anniversary.”

I froze.

The realisation hit me all at once, crashing down like a fallen Ward.

Twenty-nine years.

Our wedding.

Her look when I had walked through the front door. Her subtle glance at my empty hands. The effort of the dinner she had prepared. The three neatly wrapped parcels waiting on the chest of drawers across the room—all waiting for me.

I had forgotten.

There is no elegant, diplomatic way to phrase it.

I had simply forgotten the day Hermione Granger and I had stood before our friends and bound our lives together.

I apologised, of course.

That night.

The next morning.

Repeatedly in the days that followed.

Hermione accepted every single apology with a quiet, polite grace that almost made the guilt worse.

The following evening, I presented her with a gift I had purchased in a quiet panic from a shop in Diagon Alley—an engraved bronze bookend. I had selected it after an excruciating amount of unwanted assistance from a young clerk who assured me it was “tasteful, practical, and highly anniversary-appropriate.”

Hermione smiled when she untied the ribbon.

She thanked me warmly.

She even reached out and rested a soft hand on my knee.

Anyone watching us from the window would have assumed the matter was resolved.

I remember sitting beside her on the sofa afterwards.

I remember looking at my wife, feeling with absolute, uncompromising certainty that I loved her.

And then I noticed something I had missed before.

She wasn’t looking at me.

Her gaze had drifted toward the window, fixed on the dark garden outside. Her face was weary. Not angry, not bitter—just profoundly, terribly tired.

For the first time in nearly thirty years, I was forced to wonder whether loving Hermione Granger had made me so comfortable, so complacent, that I had allowed her to become entirely lonely sitting right beside me.

And for the first time in my life, I was genuinely terrified that simply loving someone might not be enough to make them feel it.