Disavowals

Chapter Sixteen - Legato

It was times like these Anne wished she'd never started reading the Daily Prophet. She was used to it being a herald of woe, but until now it had never heralded her woes. Other people's, sometimes dangerously close, but never quite touching her.

Luck always ran out, she knew that.

It wasn't supposed to run out today.

It was the first morning of the new year, a fresh start and a fresh hope; she was at home. She was safe with her family, Theo was safe at school, all was well with the world and her dull headache when she woke had absolutely nothing to do with the two and a half glasses of wine she'd drunk last night amidst the confusion and cheer of a neighbourhood New Year's party. However, her pounding head was unconvinced of this theory, so Anne slunk down to the kitchen for an aspirin, a drink of water, and breakfast. If she could bring herself to face breakfast.

Terry was sitting at the kitchen, having apparently heard the owl with the paper first. Eddie was at the toaster. Her parents were, sensibly, still in bed.

"G'morning," Eddie mumbled.

"Mmm," Anne replied, and started rustling through the cupboard for the box with the various medications. "Terry, weren't you trying to make Headache Potion yesterday?"

"In the fridge, the blue stuff in the glass, one teaspoonful in a glass of water," Terry said. Her tone was oddly flat.

"Are you sure you want to drink something she made?" Eddie said.

"Terry's good at Potions," Anne said, pulling the glassful of viscous blue liquid out of the fridge. "Pass a teaspoon?"

It didn't look much better when mixed with water, but from experience it worked faster than aspirin, and Anne did trust her sister this far. Even she had managed to make this stuff in Potions class, so Terry should be an expert.

"Anne, what's Gabby's last name?" Terry said, still in that strange tone. Anne put it down to lack of sleep.

"Hayle. Her sister Clara's a year ahead of you in Gryffindor. Why d'you ask?" Anne grimaced at the glass, then drank. It was sort of palatable.

"They got killed last night," Eddie announced absently. "Why does this toaster always take so bloody long?"

Anne choked on the potion. It was fortunate she'd almost finished. There was little left to spill out when the cup clattered from her hand to the bench.

"You're joking," she said, staring at the mess. The pale turquoise looked out-of-place on the pale Formica. "You're joking."

"Nah, why would I?" Eddie sounded puzzled. "It's in the paper. I thought you didn't like her very much."

"Eddie, you're horrible!" Terry shouted. Anne paid little attention. She couldn't take her eyes of the liquid shining in the early morning sun, forming one two three drops falling off the bench. She was dreaming, of course. Real life didn't go on like this when someone died. Surely there had to be tears, outrage, anything but Eddie's matter-of-fact voice and the distant buzz of Terry's scolding.

"Whoa, you two, it's a bit early for that sort of thing," Anne dimly heard her father say. "Keep it down a bit, your mum's still asleep." Footsteps crossed the kitchen. The cup had stopped its rolling on the bench. Circles. Her mind was going around in circles. It was easier than turning around.

"Anne, what's the matter?" her father said over her shoulder. "Let me help clean that up." A hand came into view, with a paper towel, wiping up the last of the potion. "Here, what's wrong, love?"

Anne finally pulled herself together enough to take the paper towel off her father and finish cleaning up. She picked up the cup and took it to the sink to rinse. Her hands weren't even trembling. Much.

"Bad news," she said, still not turning. "Eddie said a friend of mine...her family was attacked."

"Oh, Anne." A hand was laid on her shoulder. Two years ago, three, it would have promised protection. "Who was it?"

"G-Gabby Hayle." She dashed her sleeve across her face. She was not crying. "S-she's in m-my class, and she...Dad, it can't be true!" She turned around, finally, but only to walk into her father's embrace.

"Eddie, you are such a git!" Terry could be heard announcing in exasperation.

"What was I supposed to say?" he replied defensively.

Anne had abandoned all hope of pulling herself together. It was too hard, and too much easier to let her father hug her and mutter reassurances that she barely heard through the tears. Her headache had faded to a dull murmur. Eddie and Terry were silent, either through embarrassment or sympathy.

"Can I see the paper?" Anne said after what seemed a long time had passed. She pulled away from her father, who handed her a paper towel before she wiped her face with her sleeve again. He guided her to the table with a hand on her shoulder.

"A good friend of yours, was she?" he asked quietly.

"Yes. Well -" Anne paused to blow her nose. "I room with her. She's not - not a really close friend, not even the closest of the girls in my dorm, but...I liked her." The exact words eluded her, as Gabby now did; how did you explain that you found someone annoying, exasperating, silly, but also good-natured and funny? How did you explain that even a girl you would barely know if she were in another House or year mattered because you had spent six years sharing classes and meals, homework and stories with her?

How can she be dead? Not Gabby. She's pure-blood, for a start, she never has understood the war, she's too normal to die...

The article was clear enough. Just another attack, just another family gone. Anne remembered the mixed distaste and fear on Gabby's face when she'd spilled out the source of her vague antipathy towards Muggle-borns. It seemed her father's willingness to forgive and forget had brought down death on them. It didn't seem fair that Gabby should have been right about that danger.

Some of the other names in the article caught Anne's eye, too, but she couldn't quite place them. Janet and Richard Hayle, Evan and Leonora...she knew she'd heard those names before, but where and when, she couldn't say. She wondered how the unknown woman Janet must feel, having been saved by such a capricious trick of fate. Would it be worth it, to lose that much and still live?

"Would you like a cup of tea?" her father asked, hovering over her shoulder. "Coffee? Ovaltine?"

"I don't drink coffee, Dad, you know that," Anne pointed out, folding the paper so the front page faced away from her. She didn't want to look at it any more. Not knowing what to do with her hands, she folded them on the table in front of her. Thin winter sunlight was streaming in the window through a gap in the clouds, half-blinding her. It looked to be an unsettled day of sunshine and cold winds. A headache day, she had called them when she was small, the type that left her feeling like she'd never quite woken up and the world might dissolve around her at any moment. Well, the headache was fading with Terry's potion, but the dream-state wasn't.

"It's always hard when deaths come like this," her father said. Eddie had slipped out of the room; Terry, uncharacteristically quiet, was applying herself to toast and the paper.
"They're not supposed to. We're not supposed to die. Not...not now, not this soon. She was seventeen."

"It's times like these I wish you'd never heard of Hogwarts." Jonathan Fairleigh sat down beside her. "Kids grow up fast enough as it is. This is...too much."

"I wish I'd never heard of Hogwarts sometimes, too," Anne said. It was only half a lie. She felt tears rising again, and dashed them away. "We shouldn't have to be afraid."

"But we don't have to be," Terry said, looking up from her toast. "I'm not scared. Not much."

"You're very brave, Terry," their father told her, smiling.

Terry pursed her lips. "No, I'm not. Being scared's just silly. If things happen, they happen. Besides, it won't happen to us."

Anne exchanged glances with her father.

"I hope you're right," she said.

Her father picked up her hand and squeezed it. "Are you going to be all right, love?"

"Yes. I'll be...I'll be fine." How many times had she told Gabby she was fine, brushing her off? She'd never have to do that again. No more questions, no more prying, no more chatter and laughter and gossip...

"I'd better take some tea up to your mum, then." The kettle clicked, as if on cue. "Sure you don't want a drink?"

"I'm...not really hungry, right now. Or anything."

"If you're sure, then."

"Mmm-hmm." Anne nodded, still staring at the window. The sunlight had moved on, now, to another patch in the torn and tossed clouds. An unsettled day.

Mai will be scared, Ellie will be silent, Sarah will be patient, Gabby will say something tactless-

No. No, she won't, will she? No more stupid comments ever again.

Maybe Sarah will go back to normal if this gives her enough of a shock -

Anne quashed the thoughts. She couldn't be thinking about any advantages coming from her friend dying. What did that make her, a Slytherin?

Hah. Hah. Gabby would have thought that was funny.

Oh, Gabby. Oh, this can't be.

It's not fair.

Terry offered her the Muggle paper, but Anne refused. She'd go and have a shower, and think, and try to...try to...something. Maybe if she wrote some letters.
Something.

She sat cross-legged on her bed for a long time after her shower, paging through the photo album her grandfather had given her for Christmas, the one she'd spent the last few days putting her photos in. She didn't have all that many from Hogwarts, but Gabby was in most of the ones she did have; a very normal girl. The black-and-white photos couldn't show the chestnut colour of the hair she would toss over her shoulder, but they could show the ready smile and the plumpness of early adolescence transmuting into prettiness. They showed Gabby, almost alive and yet not. It was a wonder that somewhere Gabby was lying cold and still, but here in these squares of heavy paper she would forever chatter and laugh. True magic, which did not dull the pain but made it worse. After a time Anne set the album down. The dreaminess of the unsettled day was an overlay that numbed her, but the resentment she felt was starting to become overpowering. Why Gabby? Why not someone else? Why someone Anne liked?

Why touch my life again?

Throwing her pillow at the wall wasn't going to help anything, so Anne picked it up, replaced it on the bed, and got out her flute. Something to keep her hands and mind busy for a while. She could go downstairs, too, but she didn't feel up to people quite yet.

Gabby never heard me play the flute. It was all a joke, to her. Just a joke. Did she ever understand?

If you can hear me, Gabby, try and understand now.

The silver notes whispered out the window and were tossed on the chill winds. Sunlight illuminated the album lying on the bed. In front of a fire, Gabby Hayle tossed her hair over her shoulder and laughed, as she'd done when the photo was taken in October.

If you can hear me, Gabby, please understand.

*

Theo knew he'd been right about Gabrielle Hayle the first time he saw Anne after the Christmas holidays. There was a hollow look to her eyes and a nervous tilt to her head that hadn't been there before. He knew, too, from the way the Hufflepuff sixth-years clustered together, one brown-haired girl's absence as visible as she herself would have been. The returning students arrived back at Hogwarts the night before classes started again, so he didn't have a chance to speak to Anne before she was lost in the crowds.

The real surprise was the absence of something he'd been expecting. He had spent his last day of freedom returning all his belongings to the safe confines of his trunk, and adding a few creative booby-traps to the protections surrounding it in anticipation of renewed attempts on its contents. He was already at the stage of making his own bed, as the house-elves were apparently unable to get to it through the wards. It did mean no warming pans on cold nights, but it also meant safety, and that was worth shivering.

When Draco Malfoy swaggered into the dormitory, Theo was sitting cross-legged on his bed, purposefully ignoring him. He knew what to expect; the sneer, the smirk, the reminders that Theo should be able to see his own fate in his cousins'. The sneer was there. The sarcasm that failed the standards of wit quite considerably was also present. The comments were not.

"Feeling a bit lonely, Nott?" Malfoy's eyes were probably glinting with malice. Theo didn't bother looking up.

"I can't say I do, Malfoy. The holidays have been quite relaxing."

"You watch out," the other boy hissed. "You were lucky once. Not again."

There must be a draught in here. Theo could feel a cold breeze.

"You must be bored," Theo observed.

"Huh?"

"You're talking to me." He glanced up. "Or am I fit to speak with decent Slytherins, now? Do tell me if I am. I like to keep track of these things."

"You're still nothing," Malfoy spat. "You're still dead."

"As I believe Potter once commented...you'd think I would have stopped walking around."

The exchange of insults was interrupted by the entrance of Blaise Zabini. Theo felt mildly disappointed. There was quite a lot of fun to be had baiting Draco Malfoy, and the mention of Harry Potter should have been good for a two-minute rant, at least.

"Had a good holiday, Zabini?" Theo inquired. Blaise's right hand moved unconsciously to his left forearm, and Theo stiffened. "I see. A pity."

And here I was hoping I'd be able to use what he wasn't. Yes, that is a pity.

Zabini remained expressionless. "They're having a prefects' meeting at eight o'clock, Draco. Something about new curfews. Pansy asked me to tell you."

Malfoy grimaced. "Great. I have to go listen to the Weasel and the Mudblood natter on."

Blaise glanced at his alarm clock. "It's five to eight, Draco."

Malfoy swore and stalked out. Blaise remained in the room a moment longer, weighing up Theo with his gaze. Then he turned and left.

Theo shut his book with a snap. That had been...odd. He'd expected at least one of them to make veiled - or outright - comments about his cousin and her father's deaths. There had been nothing. The usual arrogance, but nothing he could pin down. It was almost as if they didn't know.

They don't know.

It had the force of a revelation. Of course they didn't know. Or, they didn't know it mattered to Theo. They couldn't get to his letters, they didn't know where he'd stayed, they didn't...

...they can't have attacked Catriona because of me, then.

That's...something. Monique and Callum are safe. Or as safe as they can be at the moment.

It couldn't resurrect Lee or her father, but it was a small comfort. Better to think about that than the painfully formal phrasing of Monique's reply to his just-as-awkward letter. Thank you for writing. We are as well as can be expected. Jan was very grateful that you wrote, but she is still in quite a lot of shock. I hope your holidays went well, otherwise... Or the more honest and, in its own way, more painful one from Catriona. I know you didn't write to me, but I've been helping Jan around the house and I read your letter by accident. Jan's in a state, as can be expected, but being herself she keeps trying to do things when it's perfectly obvious she can't. Evan keeps asking where Lee and Richard are, which doesn't help her at all. We've been very lucky, so far; maybe the odds were against us and something like this was always going to happen. At least you're safe where you are. Forgive the rambling, I should know better, but writing seems to focus my thoughts...

Family. Too painful to live with, and impossible to live without.

Thanks for writing, Theo wrote back to Catriona. It means more than you might think.

*

It was several days before he got the chance to talk to Anne, and it surprised him how small she looked. Theo knew she wasn't very tall (it was quite noticeable when...at times, anyway.) The practice rooms, where he'd always seen most of her, were low-ceilinged compared to the rest of Hogwarts (low-doorwayed, too, a source of endless annoyance and occasional pain when you were over six feet.) Maybe that had made her seem taller. Maybe she really had shrunk in the aftermath of her friend's death.

"Did you have a good holiday?" was the first thing she said, summoning up a smile.

"Christmas was all right. New Year's was bloody awful," Theo said bluntly. "About the same for you, I suppose."

The smile vanished. It hadn't taken much.

"God, Theo," she said wearily, "it's too close. I mean, why Gabby? There must be hundreds of other people with half-blood relatives. Hundreds. And it's Gabby. She was always so sure the war wouldn't happen to her, it made me believe it wouldn't. Why...I'm sorry, you don't have the answers to that."

"I wish I did," Theo said awkwardly. "I wish you did."

She tilted her head. "Then that...was that your cousin? The one you talked about? Leonora?"

Theo nodded. "Yes. I...they...funny, wasn't it. We're such an inbred bunch, all us pure-bloods. Never would have thought that my cousin's husband would be your friend Gabby's brother. Not that there are very many Hayles, but even so. Strange." He was rambling. Almost as bad as writing letters.

Anne reached out to hug him, but he wasn't sure if the embrace was for his comfort or hers.

"It's not fair." Her voice was muffled in his shoulder. "I keep saying that, and I don't know why, because of course it isn't, life isn't, I should know that by now, but I keep thinking that if I complain long enough Gabby will come back. And your cousin, too, I suppose. I didn't realise I even liked her very much until now, and now I can't tell her."

"I know." He relied on Anne so much to make sense when the rest of the world didn't, and now she was as adrift as he was, and that was wrong. "Lee...it's funny...I only met her twice. She was almost three. I don't know if you can miss that much about a kid that age. But I miss that I'm not going to get to know her growing up. I suppose I miss...who she would have been. As much as who she was."

"You didn't meet her father at all?"

"Once." Theo shrugged, resting his chin on Anne's head. "He was okay. But I was feeling a bit dazzled by all the family, and he wasn't, well, not blood family, so I sort of concentrated on trying to make sense of my family. Even though I know Callum pretty well, now, and he's not blood family either. But I was there for ten days. It's just...Richard Hayle was just a normal adult. Lee was a kid, and my cousin, and so...it seems worse. Adults are dying all the time, these days. I'm sorry for Janet, and Evan, more than for him."

Anne sighed. "Yeah. I suppose...you've lost more family there. They won't be the same. They can't be."

Theo smiled at the wall. Anne was making sense of things after all.

"No. But they're alive."

Anne sighed, again, and pulled carefully away. She perched herself on the table, wincing as it creaked. Theo leant himself on the wall beside it, quite happy to watch her sitting there dangling her feet, a short fair-haired girl looking ghostly white in her dark school robes. He owed some deity a vote of thanks, for causing him to follow after her two years ago. It had taken a special combination of boredom, curiosity, and intransigence to make him go after a Muggle-born. Amazing how the smallest things could change your life so totally.

"It's funny," Anne began, then shook her head. "We've been saying that a lot."

"Funny, that," Theo said gravely, earning himself a combination of admonitory stare and smile.

"What I meant," Anne started again, "is how the little things matter so much."

She does read my mind. On Merlin's grave, she does.

"I thought, when I saw the paper...your cousin, Janet Hayle. The odds of her not dying were so small. An attack on a house where she was. But just because her son was sick, just because she took him home at one particular moment...she's alive."

"It was more complicated than that, Catriona told me. Evan was being naughty, and crotchety, so Jan decided to take him home. Then he threw up, when they got back - explaining why he'd been out of sorts - so Jan spent a while cleaning up and putting him to bed. Then she made a Floo call to tell the others she couldn't come back. And there was no one there. So she Flooed back to the house, and..." Theo swallowed uneasily. He remembered the one person he'd seen die, seen dead; how much worse, to walk from one room to another, and see the people you'd left alive half an hour ago lying broken and gone.

Anne sucked in a sharp breath. "I - that would be hard." Her eyes were dark. Theo could imagine what she must be seeing. He'd seen it in nightmares, twice, Lee's tiny body lying bruised and cold. Anne would be seeing her friend.

He nodded, trying to shut the images out. "Jan's pretty hard-headed, from what I saw of her - one of your House, you know -" Anne raised inquisitory ***inquisitive eyebrows at that "- but Catriona wrote that she was...not functioning very well. It's...hard. Monique's letter sounded pretty grim."

"And it's not hard on you?" Anne said softly.

He shifted against the wall. "Yes. No. I.... I'm looking in, from the outside, because I didn't know them enough. But they matter, still. It's not my...my problem, except it is. That makes no sense whatsoever, I know."

"If it hurts, it's your problem." Anne laughed, bitterly, staring down at the floor. "Gabby...I keep seeing her. I keep wondering whether they just killed her, or, or...I don't want to know. But I can't stop wondering. I can't say anything to the others. I keep seeing her looking surprised, because she would have been. She looked so incredibly daft when she was surprised. I...dreamt about it. Three times, now. Except it's not always Gabby."

"Those dreams." Theo knew them. It started with Lee. It never ended with her. Monique and Callum had been there, and Jan, and Catriona, and Evan, all of them. Because they were her family. Once, Terry, and then...that nightmare had woken him, and he'd had to force himself to lie back down, to sleep. Some visions were worse than others.

"Did your Head of House talk to you?" Anne asked. "Professor Sprout talked to us. And Hannah Abbott, and Ernie Macmillan. Because they're prefects, I suppose. Everyone's being very...nice."

Theo snorted. "Do you really see Snape being consolatory?"

"Possibly not," Anne allowed.

"He...did speak to me. There wasn't very much to say."

"There never is."

"Ernie and the others spoke to me, too. In Charms." That had been...odd. "I told them, of course, they didn't know...nice is a good word. I keep wondering why they bother. Any of them."

"Ernie?" Anne said carefully.

Theo scowled. "Well...I have to call him something."

"You do." She smiled, almost impishly. "They bother because they like you, you know. Well, Megan Jones thinks you're arrogant. But the DA lot, I heard them talking, they do like having you around."

"I can't imagine why." Theo blinked. "All I do is, sort of, well, be there. And occasionally say things. I'm not really, a, a group person. I just like being able to be around people who I...don't dislike."

"An odd way of defining friendship. Then again, I suppose I'd use it, too."

Friendship? I wouldn't...I only see them in class. And at the DA.

And you talk to them. And even joke. Occasionally.

Well, it's one way of describing it.

Although I think that Ernie Macmillan in more than carefully regulated doses would result in insanity.

"Maybe you could say that."

There was silence.

"I didn't imagine the war could get this close," said Anne, after a time. "Everything's...dying. Even the music, sometimes."

"You can play for them," Theo said, eyes flicking towards the piano.

"You can," Anne agreed. "But I'm not sure where the music goes, after that. Right now I've come to the end of it. There has to be a reason, and fun isn't right for now, and forgetting is even worse."

"Forgetting seems like a very good idea," Theo said roughly. "But it only works for a little while. That's not long enough."

"It never was," Anne said. "It never was."

*

Anne had never realised how talkative Gabby actually had been until her death forced Anne to notice. The gossip and talking had formed a sort of background hum to large portions of Anne's life at school. Its absence was disturbing. Mai tried in vain to fill it, but her voice would thin out in the silence and cease. It could be anywhere. Anne could be sitting in Charms, or at breakfast, or walking down a corridor, and she'd see or hear something that triggered off once more the dreadful thought. Gabby's dead. Gabby's gone.

She found herself trying to erase the change. If she joined in the other girls' conversations, or paid attention to the gossip, or tried to get on with Sarah, maybe that would make Gabby's absence less noticeable. If, if, if. The success of that tactic made her stop. It was frightening to remember Gabby at the end of a day and think that her death was already fading into the past, already becoming part of how things were instead of how things shouldn't be. A day became two days, and two became three, and by the end of January it seemed as if Gabby had never been there, ad if her existence among them had been a dream. As if Chris Cullen's sombre face was caused by something else; as if Sarah's awkward sadness was truly because of her fight with Anne; as if that fifth bed in their dormitory belonged to a stranger whose life had never been part of theirs. Life was too busy, too filled with work and the DA and music and Theo and everything else, to spend much time mourning Gabby. It was a river sweeping her on, and Anne hadn't even noticed the current until now.

So she didn't get up and leave when the conversation did drift to Gabby, as uncomfortable as it could become. It would have been disloyal to sweep her under the rug when time was going to do that anyway - when time was already doing that. In the sulky grey days of January, the reminiscing was both painful and necessary. And she had been right; it forced Sarah to soften towards her. Anne hated the idea that she was profiting in some way from Gabby's death, so the relief that caused was effectively negated by the guilt it brought with it.

"She would have hated the Quidditch being cancelled," Ellie commented one day, staring at the mantelpiece. "She loved going and screaming herself hoarse."

"I hate the Quidditch being cancelled," Mai grumbled. "Nothing's happened. They can't stop things just because the Death Eaters might attack."

"It's best to be safe," said Sarah with a frown. "Too many students have been killed already. If they did try to attack a game -"

"They're not that stupid," Mai retorted. She fingered the notes on her lap nervously. "They aren't, are they?"

"It's sort of a moot point now the tournament's off," Ellie said.

"Gabby would have thought that was the stupidest thing of all," Anne observed softly, "the Quidditch being cancelled because of the war. She never believed anything could ever happen to her. Other people, of course, but never Gabby. She was just normal."

"Oh, she was scared." Mai's lips compressed. "She didn't like to say it to you, Anne, but she was worried stiff about her father making peace with his first wife, with her being Muggle-born and all."

"I knew that." Anne wrapped her arms around her knees. She was sitting on the floor with her back against the couch, trying to study for their Transfiguration test. "I hated thinking that she might be right. I hated that she died because she was right."

"It's so stupid that it should have been Gabby," Sarah said. They were rehashing old ground now. "I mean, she was the kind of person who you'd expect to live to be two hundred, because she didn't believe she could ever get hurt, and die in bed with lots of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren -"

" - having married someone really rich -" Ellie smiled.

" - and spent her life spending their money," Sarah finished. "Yeah, that sounds like Gabby."

"I never would have said that." Mai leaned back on the couch. "I always thought she'd end up being the gossip columnist for the Daily Prophet, and spend her time writing scandalous articles about who all the Quidditch players were going out with."

"And she'd be right." Anne shook her head. You could smile about it, in a way. "Because she was always right about that sort of thing, dammit. Even when she was just joking about how I must've had a Slytherin boyfriend, in the end it turned out that she was right."

"Remember how she spent the whole summer term of fourth year trying to get Chris to notice her?" Ellie leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. Sarah, in her armchair, unfolded her arms. "He was so thick about it."

"He's still thick," Mai said after looking around. "A bit, anyway."

"Can you believe they were still going out?"

"They were good for each other," said Sarah firmly. "I can't think that they ever would have broken up."

"I think Gabby would have got bored, sometime," Mai said. "No-one ever goes out with their boyfriend from school forever. Not their boyfriend from fourth year, anyway.

What about fifth year? was the thought that sprang unbidden to Anne's mind, but she didn't say it. She'd never thought about whether she and Theo might ever break up. It was one of those possibilities that was probably logical, because Mai was right, but had no value in real life.

"She would've not studied for the test tomorrow," Anne said out loud, "and then got up at four o'clock to study and recited theory at us all through breakfast. And passed."

Ellie chuckled. "You know...that annoyed me so much. The reciting theory bit. But it was useful, y'know? It helped me remember things."

"I keep thinking she's going to turn up any minute," Sarah said into the silence. "You know, she's just in a broom closet somewhere with Chris, or in the library, or something, and she'll walk in and I'll ask her where she's been. I keep looking for her. I keep thinking there's someone I've missed, someone I'm not looking out for, and it's Gabby..."

"Then don't try to ride herd on us so hard, and you won't think that," Ellie commented acidly, then relented. "Sorry, Sarah, that was horrible."

"Ah, you know you were right." Sarah shook her head. "I try to play parent to all of you, and it's getting too hard...oh dear. Did someone put Veritaserum in my pumpkin juice at dinner tonight?"

"We won't hold it against you," Anne told her.

Sarah's eyes narrowed. "Don't think I've changed my mind, Anne. Gabby agreed with me."

"Gabby wasn't sure. Gabby didn't know. Gabby thought it was sort of cool, and a bit wrong, and very confusing, that I'm going out with Theo. But you're not going to change my mind, Sarah." Anne decided not to remind Sarah that she'd promised not to talk to her. This amiability was too precious, too fragile.

"You're so stubborn." Sarah sighed. "You're not supposed to be. You aren't. And now you are."

"Gabby wasn't," Ellie said. "She just never got in anyone's way."

"There were plenty of times she was in my way," Anne surprised herself by saying. "Just because - well, she liked to talk all the time. And talk, and talk, and talk."

"I miss her talking," Mai said moodily. "I'm so behind on all the gossip. She kept me up to date."

"I don't." Anne snapped her mouth shut. Sarah was right; someone must have drugged dinner. "I miss her, but not that."

"De mortui nil nisi bonum," Sarah advised. "Anne, it's not nice to say things like that when someone's dead."

Ellie snorted. "Why not? It's the truth. Is that too hard, Sarah?"

"It's not too hard." Sarah frowned. "Just unfair. Gabby can't defend herself."

"I wouldn't have said those things to Gabby," Anne said. "That wouldn't have been fair."

What hypocrites we all are. Imagine what the world would be like if we all told the whole truth all of the time...

Yes, Ellie, it would be too hard. I don't think I even tell Theo the whole truth.

Not that she could think of any times she'd lied to him, but telling someone everything...it would take too long. It would be too hard.

Or do I? What haven't I told Theo?

That I'm afraid, too, so afraid, that death is coming too close to me but his fear is worse and I can't lay mine on him as well...

The things we do in the name of love.

Oh, my God, I did not just think that.

"Anne?" Ellie tapped her on the shoulder. "Anne, are you listening?"

Anne jumped. "No. Sorry. What was that?"

"What were you thinking about? You looked strange."

"Things I didn't say," Anne replied. Half-truths. Again.

Ellie, nodded, thinking she understood. "I think we've all got a few of those."

"Yeah." Mai wrinkled her nose. "Like Gabby, where are the damn Snap cards, because I lent them to you last!"

Anne couldn't help laughing, or at least smiling, with the others.

"I've got some," Ellie volunteered. "Game, anyone?"

"Let's," said Sarah, sliding down onto the floor. "I think we've been depressed enough for one night."

"Right-o." Ellie rose, stretching. She stumbled on her first step. "Ow. Pins and needles."

Anne looked across at Sarah, who, for the first time in months, met her eyes. "You're still wrong."

Anne shrugged. "I'll take my chances on that. But...I'm not disloyal, Sarah. Ever."

Sarah took a deep breath. Mai was watching them with narrowed eyes.

"I...that was sort of harsh. I suppose...if the seventh years are friends with him...maybe...he might not be on their side."

Anne nodded. It was enough. It was...more than she'd expected.

"But I can't imagine why you'd want to be his girlfriend." Sarah made a face. "He's still a Slytherin."

"Excuse me," Mai said, joining them on the floor, "at least Anne's not snogging her ex-boyfriend in broom closets." She added, as Sarah went red, "One she said, if I remember rightly, she would never talk to ever again if Death Eaters were torturing her."

"I had to talk to Jeremy, we were on patrol together," Sarah said stiffly.

Anne bit back a grin, wondering why she hadn't heard about this sooner. Oh, dear. It was going to end in tears again, she just knew it.

I didn't hear because Gabby would have told me sooner...

Gabby, Gabby, Gabby.

So you were a friend, after all.