Turn 13 of 36

She stands in her flat with the portfolio open on the table and the binding magic humming behind her ribs. He is in an atrium or a Floo or a town car or wherever Draco Malfoy goes at midnight when he has just been told he has fourteen days to build a life with someone he has spent a decade despising. She is alone with the documentation, and the documentation is enough to fill the room. The *Standards of Conjugal Presentation* section sits open under the lamplight. *Visible marital accord. Displays of physical closeness.* She reads the words again and feels nothing like desire — feels instead the particular nausea of a woman who has spent her life fighting to be taken seriously and is now legally required to perform affection for an audience of Ministry inspectors. She goes to bed. The binding magic pulls her toward the east — toward wherever he is — and she lies on her back with her hand on her sternum, feeling it. It is not painful. It is not warm. It is simply there, a thread connecting her to a man who has agreed to meet her in days, not weeks, because the clock has started and neither of them can afford to waste time pretending the other one does not exist. In the morning she will write to him. She will name a place — neutral ground, somewhere that is neither his nor hers, somewhere they can sit across from each other like adults and divide the impossible into pieces small enough to carry. She will not think about the conjugal presentation clause. She will not think about what *displays of physical closeness* will look like when the time comes, or how his hand will feel if she has to take it in front of strangers, or what his face will do if she has to stand close enough to him that the binding magic goes quiet with satisfaction. She thinks about all of it. She lies in the dark and thinks about all of it until sleep takes her, and the thread behind her ribs holds steady, patient as a compass, pointing toward a man who is lying awake somewhere in the same city, reading the same words, feeling the same pull in the opposite direction.