Turn 14 of 36

Wait — let Draco make the first move and see what his terms are

Hermione wakes at six. The binding magic is already active — a low, persistent hum beneath her breastbone that has not stopped since the signing, and this morning it pulls harder than it did last night. She presses her palm flat against her sternum and holds it there, breathing slowly, until the sensation settles into something she can ignore. It will not be ignored for long. Fourteen days. The clock started yesterday.

She makes tea. She showers. She dresses for the Ministry in grey robes with her hair pulled back, and then she stands in front of the open portfolio on the kitchen table and reads the *Standards of Conjugal Presentation* section one more time, because she will not be the kind of person who walks into a negotiation without knowing exactly what she is negotiating against. The language is precise in the way only Ministry language can be — *visible marital accord*, *documented displays of physical closeness*, *minimum of two per public event*. She reads it the way she read her NEWT texts: carefully, twice, committing the structure to memory so that when the moment comes she will not be caught off guard.

She does not write to Draco.

The decision sits in her chest alongside the binding magic, uncomfortable and deliberate. She said she would contact him via Ministry post. She meant it. But the terms of their meeting — where, when, what each of them brings to the table — will set the shape of everything that follows, and she wants to see what he does when the next move is his. Not because she is playing a game. Because she needs to know whether the man who said *I will not make this worse for you* in an empty atrium at midnight is the same man in daylight, when the pressure is real and the deadline is counting down and there is no darkness to hide the honesty in.

At the Ministry, she works. She reads case law. She drafts a memo on house-elf labour precedent that has nothing to do with anything except that it requires her full attention, and for two hours the binding magic is a background noise she can almost forget. Then, at half past ten, an owl arrives. Ministry-registered. Brown, nondescript, carrying a single folded sheet with no seal and no crest. The handwriting is narrow and precise, each letter formed with the kind of care that suggests the writer does not usually write by hand and is compensating for the unfamiliarity.

*Granger —*

*I have read the documentation. All of it. I assume you have as well. We should meet before the week is out; I would propose sooner. The conjugal presentation requirements require discussion that neither of us will want to have in a Ministry corridor.*

*I will be at the Muggle café on the corner of Lamb's Conduit Street tomorrow at three. The one with the green awning. It is neither mine nor yours. If this is unacceptable, name an alternative.*

*— D.M.*

Hermione reads the note twice. A Muggle café. He has chosen a Muggle café — a place with no Floo, no enchanted ceiling, no chance of being observed by anyone from either world. She had planned to name a neutral location herself, and she had been considering exactly this kind of place: somewhere stripped of wizarding context, somewhere they could speak without performing for either the Ministry or the pureblood establishment. He reached the same conclusion. He reached it first.

The binding magic shifts against her ribs — not a pull this time but a kind of recognition, as though the thread between them has registered that they are, for the first time, moving toward each other rather than away. She folds the note and tucks it into the inner pocket of her robes. Tomorrow. Three o'clock. A café with a green awning on a Muggle street, where she will sit across from Draco Malfoy and they will divide the impossible into pieces. She picks up her quill, turns back to the house-elf memo, and does not write a reply. He will know she is coming when she walks through the door.