apology, and bolted from the garden, heading towards the Manor as if Lucius’ pack of slavering hellhounds were on his heels.
Even Sirius and Narcissa had turned around and were staring. Ginny rose as the whispers did, conscious of Draco looking at her across the crowd, his grey eyes narrowed and cynical. Ginny began to push her way down the aisle of chairs when a hand shot out and gripped her wrist.
It was Hermione. “Don’t you dare go after him,” she whispered.
Harry, seated beside her, blinked. “But, Hermione —“
“Someone has to,” Ginny whispered back, acutely conscious of all the people around them staring. “He might hurt himself or something.”
Hermione stood up. “I’ll go,” she said, and despite Harry’s annoyed protests, pushed her way down the aisle and dashed up the path towards the Manor.
Her cheeks flaming, Ginny returned to her sit and slumped down next to her mother, wishing she could fold herself up so small that she’d disappear. Mrs. Weasley patted her hand sympathetically as the-wizard-who- wasn’t-Aberforth-but-sort-of-looked-like-him cleared his throat and began speaking again. “Don’t worry,” she said soothingly. “It’s just weddings. They make men all jumpy.”
“Bah,” said George loudly, from behind them. Fred and George had arrived seconds before the wedding started, by Portkey, from a months-long beach vacation in Belize. They were both covered in a million new freckles and George, and least, smelled strongly of coconut rum. Ignoring his mother’s glare, George added: “He’s peculiar, Finnigan is. Very peculiar.”
“I don’t remember him being all that peculiar before,” said Fred. “He must have been playing it close to the chest.”
“I think I liked it better when she was dating Malfoy,” said George.
Mrs. Weasley shook her head so hard that the flowers on her hat bent as if in a stiff breeze. “Oh, great Merlin,” she moaned. “Don’t say that.”
Ginny sat on the windowsill at the end of the Manor’s second floor hallway, a blank book open in her lap, a quill between her fingers.
Through the window, she could see the house-elves cleaning up the detritus of the wedding ceremony in the garden below: folding up the chairs, carrying away the loops of strung-together roses. The sun was setting, all blood and fire, over the distant trees.
She looked down at the book in her lap. With Tom gone — finally and forever, really gone — she had thought it might be time to start another diary, something she’d been terrified to do since it had turned out so badly her first year at school. Surely there was nothing wrong with the principle of a diary, especially a safe, blank one purchased from a Muggle bookshop. Surely if she couldn’t share her thoughts with anyone else, she could share them with herself. So far, however, she’d written exactly one word:
Today
She tapped the feathered end of the quill against her forehead as if the gesture might shake loose a few more words, but her brain was buzzing too badly to think straight. She’d gone by Seamus’ room after the ceremony, had knocked, but no one had answered. Part of her hoped he was all right. Another, smaller part of her, a shame-filled part, almost hoped he wasn’t.
“You look like a painting,” came an amused voice, “of Genius, hard at work. What are you writing?”
She looked up and saw Draco, like a black and white Beardsley portrait in his formal robes, looking down at her with calculated nonchalance. She scowled.
“Nothing,” she said, and slammed the book shut.
“Ah,” he said, “drawing pornographic sketches of me, then, are you? Well, you can’t really be blamed for that.”
“There’s nothing in here about you, Draco.”
“I find that hard to believe,” said Draco, and made a lightning-fast grab for the book, yanking it out of Ginny’s hands before she could react. He blinked down at the pages. “’Today’?” he said. “How laconic. Is this a diary or a tone poem?”
“Idiot,” said Ginny, and reached to snatch it back from him. A brief tug of war ensued, which ended when Draco let go of the book just as Ginny drew her arm back, a gesture that sent the diary sailing out the window.
There was the sound of a crash, and a high exclamation. Draco leaned out the window.
“Bugger,” he said, “you’ve smashed one of the glass centerpieces. Quick, get down.” He ducked out of the window frame and crouched under it, pulling her down beside him.
“Oh, dear,” Ginny said, overcome with guilt. “Will your mother be very upset? I hope it doesn’t wreck the reception—“
“Oh, don’t worry about it, we’ve got dozens of them and my mother won’t mind, it’s the house-elves you have to worry about. They take everything personally. I rather miss the days my father kept them all in line with a strict regimen of terror. What with my mother paying them a living wage and ensuring their job security, they’ve gotten awfully careless. One of them even refused to polish my shoes with his tongue this morning, can you believe that?”
Ginny rolled her eyes upward. “I know you don’t really think that way,” she said. “I just wonder why you have to pretend like you do.”
He grinned. “I find it very attractive when you analyze me like this,” he said. They were on their knees facing each other, close enough so that she could see the little white half-moon scar on his cheek, the individual metallic eyelashes, like strokes of a silver pencil. She could lean forward and kiss him; it would be so easy. It would be a way to say goodbye.
She stood up, jerking her hands out of his grasp. “I don’t care what you find attractive,” she said frostily, and turned to stalk off down the corridor. She could feel him watching her walk away and it made her nervous enough that her hand shook slightly as she reached the door of her bedroom, grabbed for the knob and flung it open —
