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The day of his divorce, he finally tells her.
She sits curled into the corner of the leather sofa, socked feet tucked beneath her, glass balanced in her fingers. Harry is on the side of the sofa opposite, but angled toward her, knee stretched out stiffly. He is supposed to be resting it. He is never resting it. She has already sent little stinging hexes at his upper arm twice tonight when he tried to get up too quickly, small sharp hexes to enforce what Healers’ orders cannot.
He is on his third glass of whisky tonight, the good one he keeps in the back of the cabinet in the study at Grimmauld Place, the one that tastes like smoke and honey and something that lingers at the back of the tongue after swallowing. The fire is low, more embers than flame, and the lamps are dimmed to that in-between glow that makes the heavy curtains and dark wood feel almost soft.
She stares into the amber liquid in her glass. Still her first. She is pacing herself. She’s still a lightweight and not even five years of Manhattan bars and MACUSA cocktail parties and the particular metallic tang of New York in winter has raised her tolerance.
This one glass will last a while.
The last time she was drunk was at his wedding.
The November sun was just dipping behind the horizon when Ginny started down the aisle. Hermione had had two shots of whisky—the first in the flat she and Luna were sharing for those months after graduation before her internship at MACUSA started. The second was with the Weasley brothers, folded miserably into their attempts at filial joviality. She slipped out before they could strong-arm her into seeing the groom with them. Ron noticed. Of this, she was certain.
So she hid behind a hedge in the garden in case Ron came looking for her, shivering because it was the part of the garden that wasn’t enchanted to stay warm. And she made it to her seat before the music started. Before her eyes fixed on Harry as they always did—traitorous, untrustworthy things. Before she watched him look at his bride like gravity had chosen a single point and fixed him there as Ginny walked toward him.
Hermione took advantage of the open bar, and when he finally asked her to dance, he must have realized quickly she was in no shape to do so because he led her to a table where Luna and Padma met her with cheers and another glass of champagne. She remembered his hand on her shoulder, the gentle squeeze and his soft, “Have fun, Hermione” before he went back to his bride.
She, blessedly, had very few remaining memories of the day.
—
That Christmas Eve at the Burrow, she was stone-cold sober as she sat in the kitchen sipping a mug of tea. Luna had been traipsing across Sweden with Newt Scamander’s grandson, Rolf, and the apartment had been quiet save for Crookshanks’ desperate meows for attention and his satisfied rumbles when she gave him a second meal of the day. She had had time to think. Time to wallow in her grief over her unresolved feelings for her best friend. Time to give herself a stern talking-to about loyalty and friendship and being a bloody Gryffindor for Merlin’s sake and getting through this. She had come to understand that drinking was doing her no favors in facing reality. She had decided she might have a glass of mulled wine the next day, in memory of Christmases with her parents. Or she might not. She might remain, she thought, in her pajamas, watching Christmas movies and eating the cookie plate Molly would insist she take home that night.
At the Burrow, she stared at the table in front of her, avoiding his gaze. He probably knew something was wrong with her and she knew something was wrong with him—with them, she thought. Or perhaps that was just wishful thinking. Or resentful thinking. Or defensive thinking, convinced as she was that she was the only one who would ever truly understand and know Harry Potter. But when she finally risked a glance, she saw how it was Ginny his gaze was tracking, kitchen to sitting room to garden, dark and hungry and worshipful.
And something in Hermione’s chest closed tight, like a book snapped shut and shelved.
—
She left in January for the internship with Duffy Frobisher, the department head of MACUSA’s Spell and Charm Integrity research division. She was glad she hadn’t taken one of the multiple offers for a position in the Ministry of Magic. Or followed one of the enticing mastery plans that she’d been offered. The job in New York fit her perfectly. She didn’t seem to go through an awkward settling-in stage. She was immediately competent. Immediately accomplished. When Frobisher extended the job offer on a permanent basis, it was an easy yes though she said she might need to return to Britain to tie up a few loose ends.
She found she did not, in fact, need to return.
—
They kept in touch, of course. Wrote light letters. Work stories. Weather reports. Carefully ordinary things. Floo calls where Ginny and Ron joined in and Harry smiled and nothing was false, and nothing was fully said. Distance could exist even in honesty; she learned that quickly.
—
She invited all of them to visit her in New York. Harry and Ginny together, naturally—but schedules never aligned. Quidditch seasons. Auror rotations. Research grants. Life.
Ron, on the other hand, visited her twice. The first time was just a few weeks after she moved. They confirmed aloud what had already been understood between them—that they worked far better as friends than anything else. And when he left, she threw herself into building a life with renewed resolve: making friends with colleagues, joining a no-maj book club, going on dates, dancing in clubs, jogging in Central Park, learning where to buy the best bagels, complaining about the water pressure and the heat in her flat, figuring out how to keep a cooling charm in place even on the subway in August.
The second time Ron visited was the next spring. They rented an old convertible and she taught him to drive on the way to Charleston, South Carolina. They walked the Old Towne and Hermione bought a seagrass basket for Molly from a Gullah woman who wouldn’t let her take a photo without purchasing her wares. They sat in the back of a horse-drawn carriage tour, stumbled upon a little pub of displaced Irish wizards singing raucous drinking songs, and walked along the Battery eating ice cream. Ron told her he and Luna were planning to meet Charlie in Romania and his eyes shone even as his ears burned when he said Luna’s name. She felt only overwhelming fondness for him. That was all and it felt like more than enough.
—
Later that fall she met Aran. Handsome, brilliant Aran, whom she ran into—literally—outside Temple Emanu-El on East 65th Street on a windy Friday evening. Aran with the clever mouth and reverent hands and a dextrous tongue and the patience to learn her body like a language. Aran who taught her that pleasure could be studied and generous and astonishing. Aran, into whom she desperately wanted to relax—to let him provide the shelter she had once found only in a boy with green eyes and a crooked smile. Aran, from whom she yearned for the welcome, the ease, the belonging that had once felt effortless.
Aran, who willingly offered the harbor of his body and his heart.
Aran, to whom she suspected she couldn’t give the same.
—
The next year, Ron and Luna visited on the Summer Solstice to elope in the Catskills, barefoot and radiant and entirely themselves. They asked Hermione to be their witness. Harry couldn’t come—he was undercover somewhere in Eastern Europe—and Ginny was mid-season. Besides, if you had one Weasley at a gathering, you had them all. So Hermione stood for the families, for the friends, for the tangled web of love that had made them who they were.
It was almost a year later that they were calling to tell her that a baby was on the way.
Then a few weeks later, another call to announce it was babies, plural.
Ron was flushed and flustered, stammering and giggling in turn when he announced the news while Luna just beamed at him, proud and serene.
Hermione found herself delighted.
__
And then that Christmas she was breaking off an engagement and telling Aran he would be over her soon enough and sending him home to Chicago with well-wishes and a relief that went bone-deep.
She had tried.
She knew it would never be fair to him.
—
But even that didn’t prompt her to return home. Not even when a message arrived from Harry—through secure channels, because he was deep undercover again—brief and warm and steady, telling her he had heard the news, that she was the strongest person he knew, that she would be all right in the end.
Not even when the babies were born in March and her fridge became plastered with pictures that she went ahead and charmed still so that her muggle friends didn’t see the way the little redheads moved in tandem. They were so in sync already.
Instead there was work, and there were friends, and there was the city itself, alive, pulsing, vibrating with an energy that had nothing to do with anything she manufactured or controlled. She walked the streets of her neighborhood, greeted Mrs. Sanchez at the bodega on the corner, played hopscotch with Amal and Nyta on nights their mother worked, brought the paper to Mr. Liebowitz in the flat below hers, made friends with Tiffany at the front desk of the library who set aside the new novels for her to read first before they went into circulation and accrued a waiting list.
She took up Pilates and decided to learn to read Chaucer in Middle English.
Her mind was full.
Her heart was not.
—
But then last month. A late night Floo chime indicating a call and in it Ron’s voice, shaking and strained, telling her about an attack in Hogsmeade. A former Death Eater. A patrol gone wrong. Blood on cobblestones she knew by heart. Ginny was with him at St. Mungo’s. They were asking her to come.
She didn’t hesitate. Five minutes later she had the head of the MACUSA Portkey Office on the phone and was pulling clothes from hangers, directing them into a bag with her wand as she begged for an expedited process. She called her friend Melanie to take Crookshanks. And a mere two hours after Ron’s face had appeared in the Floo, she was portkeying into the Ministry. As soon as she was cleared of customs, she apparated to the sliding doors of St. Mungo’s A&E and rushed inside searching wildly, frantically. Her eyes were gritty with lack of sleep; she had no idea what time it was. Ron and Luna found her and pulled her into an embrace outside the ward. Ginny emerged from a room, grasped her hand, and pulled her inside.
And there was Harry, lying in the bed, the only sign of injury a small crease between his brows and dried blood at the corner of his mouth. So very still and so pale. His face was heartbreakingly beautiful to her.
Ginny wrapped her arms around Hermione and leaned against her, wiping away the tears streaming down Hermione’s cheeks. They didn’t speak while they watched his breathing—shallow, sometimes shuddering. After a while—minutes, hours, years—Ginny placed both hands on Hermione’s shoulders and turned her gently towards her. She dipped her head slightly to meet Hermione’s eyes and held her gaze. “It’s time to come home, Mie,” she said gently. “He needs you.”
Then she bent, kissed Hermione’s cheek, and walked out.
—
Hermione wasn’t sure exactly what happened in that exchange, but she also didn’t analyse it much. Instead she moved to the chair at his bedside and sat there for four days straight, holding his hand. Ginny came and went but held herself apart from Harry like a good friend watching another good friend struggle. Hermione discovered she had been given the same medical permissions as Ginny. And Ginny asked for Hermione’s thoughts on everything, directed healers to confer with Hermione, let Hermione’s needs dictate who was present and who wasn’t.
So when Ginny explained she had to return to Wales and that Harry would understand her absence and would explain everything when he woke, Hermione just stared and then nodded and laced her fingers with his again. And Ginny watched Hermione’s thumb stroke over his knuckles, met her eyes, thanked her quietly, and left.
—
On the fifth day, he opened his eyes and when they focused on hers, a smile, tired and grateful, broke across his face. She dropped her face to his hand to hide her tears of relief, pressing her lips to his knuckles and she felt his other hand in her hair as he sighed, deep and full. When she finally was composed enough to look back up again, his eyes were closed.
The smile remained.
So she remained with him—when he struggled through the first days of physical therapy, when his face went white with pain while he tried to make his legs move on command, when his arms shook with the effort of holding himself up. And when he was finally released at the end of the month, she helped him move back to Grimmauld and arranged physical therapy healers and called Kreacher back from Hogwarts and set up a schedule of visitors and meals.
And sometime in those long days, Hermione realised her life in America was like a beloved coat that no longer fit her shoulders. She called Melanie and asked her to keep Crookshanks longer. And she called Frobisher and asked him to recommend her work to the British Ministry. And she flooed Kingsley and applied for a transfer. And she texted an estate agent in Manhattan and asked her to figure out how to sublet her apartment. And she asked Ron and Luna for their spare room until her parents’ old house was free again only to be asked by Harry to move in to Grimmauld.
Stay with me—for a while, at least. Please.
She stayed.
Falling back into Harry is easy. Like stepping into a current whose strength she already knows. She does not bring up the odd circumstances of her presence here. Ginny's absence. What it is that he is scheduled to explain.
Instead, she brings him tea and reads the paper to him. She watches game after game of football and insists that he sit through the Regency-era miniseries she loves until he is the one requesting, just one more episode. She finds old books and begins arguments on case law and spell theory with him. She forces him to start walking up the stairs and then begins sending stinging hexes when he refuses to stop and adequately rest the knee that has been ripped apart in the blast.
And always she waits for the other shoe to drop.
—
It has been a long day. An owl arrives early in the morning and Harry retreats into himself for most of the day.
After dinner, he asks her to join him in the study. He pours whisky and asks her to read her favourite poetry to him. She does for his first two glasses. Somewhere in the middle of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, he tips his head back against the sofa.
Now, he is humming softly to himself. She doesn’t recognise the tune. His eyes are closed. One hand holds the whisky lightly. The other holds her stocking foot, thumb pressing into the arches. She sighs and stretches towards him.
All this time and when they sit on a sofa, her feet still find his hands; his hands still find her feet.
—
He exhales slowly, a sound that carries more weight than the room should hold.
“I should tell you something,” he says.
The air shifts between them. She looks up.
His fingers are tight around the glass. Not nervous, exactly. Braced.
“The divorce went through this morning,” he says.
She stares at him for a long moment.
“Divorce?”
The word feels foreign in her mouth, like she’s picked up the wrong one by mistake. She isn’t sure she’s heard him correctly.
He opens his eyes and looks at her then, deliberate and intense, the corner of his mouth lifting in a soft, wry smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Yeah,” he says. “Divorce. Ginny and me.”
He drags a hand through his hair, mussing it in that familiar, unconscious way—one of the few gestures that has survived war and prophecy and adulthood entirely intact.
Hermione sets her glass down carefully on the table. She turns toward him fully, draws her feet back just enough to sit upright, gives him her complete attention. The way she always has, when it matters.
“Harry…”
His gaze holds hers—bright, earnest, a little haunted.
“Actually,” he says, “it could’ve been an annulment.”
She blinks.
“Because we never consummated our marriage.”
For a second, her thoughts scatter, like papers caught in a draft. She shakes her head slightly, as if that might settle them.
“You mean—”
“I never slept with Ginny,” he says quietly. “Not once.”
The words land softly but heavily, like snow that bends branches.
Hermione blinks. Once. Twice.
“But—how—”
He lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh, except there’s no humor in it. “Well the war ended and you went to Australia and then you came back.” He swallows. “And that was—hard.”
He stops talking for a moment, staring into his glass, and she closes her eyes against the memories. The heartbreak of leaving her parents with their minds broken, of coming home to a Burrow full of grief—Fred gone, the Weasleys shattered, her own loss a raw, gaping wound. She had flooed in quietly, hoping for...what? Harry, she knows now though she hadn’t understood that quite as well then. She remembers how she stepped from the hearth, her heart pounding, her eyes and arms searching for him. And he was there. But in the garden, holding Ginny, his arms wrapped around her as she sobbed into his chest. The way Ginny clung to him, the way his hand stroked her hair—it looked like solace she herself needed, like something inevitable blooming between them in her absence.
Like Hermione had returned too late.
The pain was overwhelming. She’d apparated straight to her parents’ empty house, the silence there a mirror to the one building inside her. She couldn’t face him, couldn’t risk hearing him say it aloud: that Ginny had been there for him while she was gone, that they’d found each other in the ruins. The war had taken so much—her family, her certainty, and now—him.
She’d curled up in her childhood bed and wept. She was haunted by the ghosts of what they’d shared. Haunted by his body moving against hers in the tent. Haunted by his body limp in Hagrid’s arms at Hogwarts and the screams she hadn’t been able to hold back. Haunted by his body wrapped around Ginny, haunted by her hopes for a future she couldn’t touch.
His voice breaks in through her remembrance. “You and Gin went back to Hogwarts and I was in training and you—you told me I should date her—”
She takes a shuddering breath and still can’t open her eyes. She had let the silence stretch until Harry and Ron left for auror training at the beginning of August—letters unanswered at first, then brief, polite replies. When Harry finally threatened to leave the training if she didn’t talk to him, she’d written back that they didn’t need to talk, that he should date Ginny, that she was perfect for him, that he deserved someone who hadn’t run away to the other side of the world.
The words had burned like live coals.
She stops herself from groaning aloud, the weight of those stacked misses pressing down on her. “That was —hard,” he has just said. Understatement of the century, Potter, she thinks.
She returns to his voice, still trying to explain for her. “And so—we did date. And it was—fine. We didn’t kiss much when we saw each other. We sat together and held hands and that felt like enough. And it didn’t bother me. I wasn’t in any shape to love anyone well. And she said we shouldn’t have any pressure to do anything physical until we were married—that it was the right thing to do in the wizarding world. And she must have told Molly that because then one day, Molly was saying how happy she was that we were getting married. And Arthur thanked me for giving Molly some joy again and then she and Ginny were planning the wedding. And it felt like the next day we were married.”
She looks at him now where he sits, knuckles white on his glass, brows knitted together. He glances at her and lifts one shoulder. “And the sex stuff—we tried, I guess. But we were nervous and I could tell she was scared and it just wasn’t right. And I would never, ever force us to do something either of us didn’t want.”
He pauses and takes a breath. “So we lived together and I tried to love her well. I really, honestly tried, Hermione, to be what I thought a husband was meant to be. But every time it… every time we got close, something just… stopped us.”
The fire pops, a small sharp sound in the quiet.
“I thought it was stress,” he goes on. “Trauma. Merlin knows I had enough of it and it couldn’t have been easy for her having Voldemort living in her body when she was just beginning puberty.” His finger traces the rim of his glass. “I kept thinking the physical stuff would fix itself. That one day we’d wake up and we’d be attracted to each other and be normal about it.”
He takes another drink. “But it never happened.”
Hermione can’t seem to find her voice. She just watches him, breath shallow, heart knocking hard against her ribs.
“And then,” he continues, head tipped back again, eyes closed, “you know how it is. There’s life. I was on assignment; she was in-season, or training. We were rarely in the same place long enough to deal with it properly.” He exhales. “I knew we needed help. So I suggested a mind healer. She said she wanted to. But she just… kept putting it off. And other than not having sex, everything felt good. We were friends.” He glances at Hermione, something naked in the look. “And I think I needed a friend.”
Heat rushes to her face, sudden and unwelcome. New York. Distance. Deliberate restraint. Her stomach drops.
“Harry, I’m so—”
He shakes his head at once. “No. Don’t. It’s not your fault.”
He stares into the fire now.
“When we finally went to the mind healer, we’d been married almost two years. And on the second appointment, I told the mind healer about us. You and me. During the war.”
He looks back at her. “And somehow, Ginny knew. Though she said you hadn’t told her. She just knew I hadn’t given her my whole heart.”
Hermione is flushed now and she feels small and miserable that Ginny thought she didn’t have a chance. She opens her mouth to say something, to make some apology.
But Harry goes on. “And then Ginny told me why she couldn’t give herself to me.”
He pauses and takes a deep breath.
“Ginny is gay, Hermione.”
Hermione’s mouth falls open.
He huffs a small laugh.
“Okay. So you didn’t know. She thought you might’ve suspected.”
She shakes her head slowly. “No. I—I had no idea. Does Ron know?”
Harry shrugs. “He might now. The day before the Hogsmeade attack, Gin said he didn’t.” He grins. “Or rather, he didn’t formally know. You know how Luna is. She’s probably had it all figured out since the first time they met on the Hogwarts Express.”
She permits herself a small smile thinking of Luna’s prescient ways. But then her mind is spinning again. “And that was when you’d been married for two years? That was a long time ago, Harry.”
He goes quiet for a beat, then says, carefully, “Ginny was really scared, Hermione. Not of me. But of wizarding society. Of the press. Of what it would do to her career. Of her parents and what they would think. Of what it would do to Arthur’s career and George and Ron’s shop. I just—I didn’t realise how bad it still is for anyone who isn’t heterosexual in wizarding Britain.”
Her embarrassment shifts, deepens, turns inward. She has always thought of herself as progressive, open-minded…and aware. At MACUSA, sexuality is unremarkable in its variety. Melanie, who is one of her closest friends there, is an openly trans woman. And yet Hermione feels, suddenly, like she has been living in a pocket of ease she hadn’t realised was sheltered. She is ashamed of this ignorance.
“So it was an easy choice to stay,” Harry goes on. “Like I said—we were good friends. And honestly, we didn’t even live together most of the time.”
Hermione swallows. “And you were never…interested in anyone else?”
He closes his eyes and tips his head back against the sofa.
“That’s complicated,” he says after a moment.
Her stomach tightens. She isn’t sure she can bear to watch him be in love with someone else again. Not really.
“So why now?” she asks quietly. “The divorce.”
He opens his eyes and looks at her.
“Because Ginny has fallen in love,” he says. “With a reporter. Welsh. Sister of their team’s coach.” A faint smile ghosts across his face. “They want to be together. Properly. They want to get married.”
Hermione’s chest aches.
“They’re talking about leaving the wizarding world,” he adds. “Going Muggle. Starting over somewhere quiet.”
The fire settles, embers glowing low. Harry’s hand is still warm around her foot, thumb pressing gently into the arch—steady, familiar—and for a second she feels the ghost of it along her calf, her thigh, the way it used to wander when they thought no one would ever find out.
She sits with him in the quiet that follows, the fire ticking and settling, the weight of what he’s said spreading slowly through her chest. She lets it sit there. Lets herself feel the shape of it without trying to solve it, the way she has learned to do with grief and truth both.
Harry doesn’t rush her. He rarely does, when it matters. He just keeps humming under his breath, some half-remembered tune, thumb still pressing gently into the sole of her foot as if anchoring them both to the room.
After a while—she isn’t sure how long—it hits her. Not all at once, but like a door she didn’t know was there swinging quietly open.
“Harry?” she says.
He hums in response, eyes still closed.
“Does this mean that you’ve never…”
She trails off, heat creeping up her neck. She can’t quite make herself say it.
His eyes open. He looks at her. And then—astonishingly—his face goes red. Not a faint flush, not a polite warming. Proper, Weasley-level red, blooming from his ears down his neck.
“…never had sex again?” he finishes for her.
She winces, then nods.
“Yes. That’s what it means,” he says, watching her.
Now it’s her turn. She feels the color rush to her cheeks, all the way to the tips of her ears.
“Oh.” The sound is small. And then, absurdly, she says it again. “Oh..”
They sit there, two adults with decades of shared history, suddenly rendered ridiculously shy.
“So,” she ventures, and immediately regrets opening her mouth, “how have you—”
He laughs then, a short startled bark of it, cutting her off.
“Hermione,” he says, incredulous. “You’re not actually asking me for details about my relationship with Rosy Palmer and her five sisters, are you?”
The sound she makes is halfway between a snort and a choke and she feels herself, impossibly, blushing even more furiously. “Well, no! I just—” She gestures helplessly with her hand. “I don’t even know what I’m asking.”
She smacks his good knee without thinking, firm enough to sting.
“Ow,” he objects, rubbing it. “Careful! I need that one.”
He’s still smiling, though there’s color high on his cheekbones now, something boyish and undone about him that makes her chest ache.
“If you’re asking whether I was faithful,” he says more soberly, “I was. Absolutely. Ginny offered an open marriage. More than once. But we both knew that was a terrible idea. Too much risk. Too many people who would talk.” He shrugs. “And besides… it’s like something in me just shut down.”
She frowns. “Shut down?”
“Yeah.” He takes a sip of whisky, then adds, almost thoughtfully, “Ginny says that’s part of why same-sex partnerships are still so controversial in the wizarding world. There’s this belief—about bonding magic. That once you do the bonding, sexual attraction will follow. No matter what you thought you wanted.”
Hermione’s brows knit together. “I don’t think that’s true.”
He shrugs again, easy, unbothered. “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s all in my head. Either way… it hasn’t been unbearable.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then he glances at her. “I imagine that will change.”
Something tightens low in her stomach.
She studies his face—the familiar lines, the scar she has traced more times than she can count, the steadiness of him—and before she can stop herself, she asks, “Is there someone you want to be with?”
The room seems to still.
Harry looks down into his glass, watching the amber liquid catch the firelight. When he looks up again, there is something in his expression she hasn’t seen before. Not just vulnerability—that she knows well—but awareness. Intention. And beneath it, unmistakably, hope.
“Yes,” he says quietly. Almost a whisper. “There is.”
She can’t look away. Her heart is pounding now, loud in her ears. She swallows, then drops her gaze back to her hands. They’re shaking.
She is going to have to watch him fall in love.
The thought lands with a dull, aching certainty, and she lets it sit there, burning through her and behind her eyes with a heat that builds toward tears.
He’s quiet. Still. His hand is warm around her foot, thumb moving in small, absent circles like he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. He’s waiting. She can feel it in the air between them—the held breath of it.
The lump in her throat is enormous. She swallows against it, hard. Refuses to let it break her open. She has done too much work, lived too many years learning how to carry her own heart carefully.
She reaches for her glass mostly to have something to do with her hands.
“Okay,” she whispers. So soft she isn’t sure it made it all the way into the room.
His breath catches.
“Okay?” he echoes, and there’s something fragile in the word, something that almost sounds like fear.
She keeps her gaze fixed on the amber swirl in her glass.
“I’ll help you, Harry,” she says. Each word chosen, placed, like stepping stones across a river. “Whoever she is. I just… I want you to be happy.”
Her voice wavers on the last word. A sharp, involuntary ache blooms low in her belly—not grief alone, but the old, stupid want she’s carried for fifteen years, the one that still wakes her some nights with his name caught in her throat. She lifts her eyes because she knows he’ll expect it, because she knows how to look like she means uncomplicated things. The tears blur her vision and she hopes—fervently—that he will mistake them for tenderness instead of grief.
For a heartbeat he just stares at her.
Then something changes.
The look on his face steals the air from her lungs. His eyes go bright, astonished, like someone has just handed him the answer to a question he’s been afraid to voice. Light spills across his features, disbelief and relief and something dangerously close to joy.
He lets out a breathless laugh. Sets his whisky down with exaggerated care, as if suddenly the world requires gentleness. He reaches for her glass too, removes it from her fingers before she can protest, places it beside his.
She barely has time to process that before his hand tightens around her foot and gives a firm tug.
She slides towards him on the leather.
“Harry—?” she starts.
Another tug. Stronger.
“Harry, what—”
And then he’s leaning forward, hands catching hers, warm and sure. He draws her toward him with a confidence that feels new, or maybe simply long-suppressed. The world tilts as he guides her up, across the small space between them, until she half-stumbles into his lap.
She makes a startled sound, instinctively bracing a hand on his shoulder.
“Your knee—!”
“Forget my knee,” he murmurs.
His hands come up to her face, cupping her cheeks, thumbs brushing at the tears she failed to contain. His eyes are so green up close, so alive, wide and luminous and unbearably open. There is nothing guarded about him now.
He studies her like he’s confirming something miraculous.
She draws in a sharp breath when his gaze flickers, just briefly, to her mouth. Heat follows it, unmistakable.
“You idiot,” he says softly, grinning in a way that is helpless and fond and completely unrestrained. “You brilliant, impossible, beautiful idiot witch.”
Her mind can’t catch up. Her heart is racing too fast. She can only look at him, eyes darting between his, cataloguing every line of happiness etched into his face, every crease beside his eyes that speaks of real joy.
He still holds her as if she might vanish. As if he has decided not to risk letting go.
Then he leans forward until their foreheads rest together, his voice dropping into something careful and vulnerable and entirely Harry.
“It’s you, Hermione,” he says. “It’s always been you.”
A breath.
“Tell me,” he whispers, “there’s still a chance for me.”
For a long moment, she can’t speak.
His words hover between them, fragile and terrifying and incandescent. It’s you. They don’t feel real yet. They feel like something she has imagined in quieter, lonelier hours and then carefully packed away again.
Her first instinct is disbelief.
She pulls back just enough to look at him properly. She searches his face for humor, for deflection, for the soft cruelty of a misunderstanding.
“Harry,” she says carefully, and the way his name sounds in her mouth surprises her. “You—you can’t mean that.”
His hands don’t drop. If anything, they firm, thumbs warm against her jaw.
“I do.”
She shakes her head, breath coming too fast now. “You’re—this is—” She gestures helplessly between them. “You’ve just told me about your marriage. About Ginny. About—everything. You’re hurting. People say things when they’re—”
“When they’re relieved?” he supplies gently. “When something they’ve been holding their breath for finally lets them breathe again?”
Her heart stutters painfully.
“You don’t mean that,” she whispers again.
“I do,” he says, and there is no hesitation in it. No bravado. Just truth. “This isn’t new, love. It’s always been here. I knew it. Ginny knew it. I just didn’t have the words before.”
She swallows. “You two were married, bonded—” she tries again, but she can’t make herself complete the argument.
“We were trying to be bonded,” he says quietly. “That’s not the same thing as giving someone your whole self, Hermione. Loving someone all the way.”
Her breath hitches.
When he speaks again, his voice comes out small. “I spent years convincing myself that loving you was something I could outgrow. I used to wake up hard just from hearing your name, then spend the day pretending it was nothing. Every time you wrote, every time your laugh came through the Floo, it was like pressing on a bruise I couldn’t stop touching. I told myself it would fade. It never did.”
She knows she is staring at him in awe.
“And I was very good at persisting,” he continues. “I told myself it was finished. That it had passed. That it was safer that way.”
He leans his forehead against hers. His breathing is ragged. “But that could only happen if I shut myself off completely, Hermione. Ginny never stood a chance with me. And I never stood a chance with her.” He pulls back to look at her then and he says it again. “It’s always been you, Hermione.”
She closes her eyes. In her mind’s eye, scenes flash of their lives together: him disappearing through the flames to confront Quirrell, the strength of his shoulders where she pressed her face into him as they flew through the air on Buckbeak’s back, his presence frightened and still steady when she opened her eyes in the hospital wing after the Department of Mysteries, his face full of wonder and awe as he held her in the tent, his breath catching against her throat in the dark, the slow, trembling slide of him inside her, the world narrowed to just the two of them.
She reaches then for him. Places her hand on his cheek. Feels the stubble of his beard, rough against her palm.
And, finally, she lets herself say it.
“It’s always been you, too, Harry.”
The words feel terrifying and inevitable all at once, like stepping off a cliff and discovering there is ground beneath her after all.
His answer is immediate, fierce in its gentleness. He pulls her closer, arms wrapping fully around her now, as if sealing something precious and long-fractured back into place.
“Good,” he murmurs into her hair, the word half-laugh, half-prayer.
And when his mouth finds hers, it is soft and wondering, like he is afraid the moment might dissolve if he presses too hard. The first brush of his lips is almost a question. A pause. A chance to retreat.
She doesn’t.
Her hands tighten in his jumper instead, fingers curling into the familiar fabric at his shoulders, and she answers him in the way she never has before—without restraint, without second-guessing, without the careful distance she has held like a shield for years.
The kiss deepens, not frantic or desperate, but achingly sure. The kind of kiss built on a shared tent and whispered plans and hands clasped in the dark when the world was ending. The kind of kiss that carries years of almosts.
He exhales against her mouth, a sound that trembles at the edges, and she feels the way his hold on her shifts—from grasping to grounding, from fear to certainty.
When they part, it is only by inches. Their foreheads rest together again, breath mingling, the air between them warm and alive.
“I thought I’d ruined this,” he admits quietly. “By waiting. By being stupid. By trying to do the right thing in all the wrong ways.”
She huffs a small, tear-wet laugh.
“You did do the right thing,” she says. “Just not the easy thing.” She chuckles again. “Never the easy thing for us, Harry James Potter.”
He smiles and his thumb traces the line of her jaw like he is mapping something sacred.
“Are you sure?” he asks and she knows it’s not a question about the past. It’s about now. About them.
She lifts her eyes and meets his gaze fully. There is no flinching left in her. No hedging.
“I crossed an ocean to forget you,” she says softly. “And somehow ended up back in your sitting room, sending you stinging hexes for not resting your knee then sitting on it so I can tell you I love you.”
She presses a kiss to the side of his mouth before pulling back to meet his eyes again.
“I think that’s my answer.”
His smile then is quiet and bright and deeply, deeply Harry—the boy in the cupboard, the boy on the train, the man who kept choosing love even when it cost him.
Outside, somewhere in the square, a group of friends shout and laugh together. The fire settles into glowing coals. The house that has held so much grief holds something else now, something lighter.
He presses one last, lingering kiss to her lips before gently moving her off his lap so that he can stand. He extends his hand to her and she takes it, letting him pull her up until their bodies brush.
They move up the stairs in step, her stocking feet silent on the worn runner, his hand never releasing hers. At the bedroom door he stops, turns her gently to face him, and cups her face with both hands. His thumbs trace slow arcs along her cheekbones—the same deliberate circles he used to press into the arch of her foot, only now they wander lower, brushing the sensitive skin of her throat, the hollow of her collarbone. She shivers, and he smiles against her mouth, small and knowing.
“No more waiting,” he murmurs, voice rough with something deeper than whisky.
She nods once, breathless, and follows him inside. The door shuts softly behind them.
They are here.
Together.
Finally.