Turn 15 of 36

Hermione arrives at the café at five minutes to three. The green awning is exactly where his note said it would be, faded by rain and sun into something between sage and grey, and the window beneath it is fogged with the particular warmth of a room where too many people are drinking hot things in too small a space. She pauses outside. The binding magic pulls forward, eager, a compass needle finding north, and she presses her hand briefly against her coat and tells it to behave.

Inside, the café is small and crowded. Muggle jazz plays from a speaker behind the counter, something with a muted trumpet that sounds like it belongs in a different decade. The air smells of ground coffee and wet wool. She finds him at a corner table in the back, his coat folded over the chair beside him, a cup of something dark sitting untouched in front of him. He is reading the cohabitation documentation — the full portfolio open on the table, pages fanned out like a hand of cards, and he has a Muggle pen in his right hand that he is using to underline passages with the same narrow precision she saw in his owl. He does not look up when she approaches. He already knows she is there. She can tell from the set of his shoulders, which have shifted from the rigid line of solitude to something slightly more open, as though the air around him has rearranged itself to accommodate a second person.

"You came," he says, without raising his eyes from the page.

"I said I would."

"You didn't say. That's rather the point."

Hermione sits. The chair is close to his — the table is small, built for two, and there is no way to arrange herself that does not put her knee within inches of his. She pulls the portfolio toward her, scanning the pages he has marked. He has underlined the conjugal presentation requirements heavily, twice, and in the margin beside *documented displays of physical closeness* he has written a single word in his narrow script: *choreography*. The same word they used in the atrium. She feels something unknot in her chest — relief that he has not forgotten, that the daylight version of Draco Malfoy is still the man who negotiated terms at midnight instead of the boy who slurs her name in corridors.

"My mother doesn't know," he says. He says it to the page, not to her, and his voice has the careful flatness of someone testing whether they can say a true thing without it costing too much.

"About the fourteen-day timeline. About the conjugal requirements. She thinks we have a month. She thinks the terms are what she read before the signing — what she tried to amend."

Hermione looks at him. "What happens when she finds out?"

Draco sets the pen down. He finally looks at her, and his face is the atrium face — stripped, deliberate, the mask held loosely rather than worn.

"She will go to the Ministry. She will make a scene. And the Ministry will use her anger as evidence that the Malfoy family is obstructing the reconciliation process, which will give them grounds to tighten the terms further."

He pauses. The trumpet on the speaker reaches a low, aching note and holds it.

"So she cannot find out. Not yet. Not until we have a residence and the first inspection is behind us."

Hermione understands the cost of what he has just said. He is asking her to help him keep a secret from his mother — a woman who tried to protect him from this contract, who stood in a Ministry office and said *you do not understand the cost*. And he is right. If Narcissa learns the timeline has been halved and the Ministry is requiring her son to perform physical affection with a Muggle-born woman in public, she will react, and her reaction will be weaponised against the family the contract is supposed to protect.

"She will find out eventually," Hermione says.

"She will. But by then we will have handled it. By then it will be a fact, not a crisis."

He picks up his cup. The coffee is cold — she can tell from the way the surface sits, flat and dark, no steam — but he drinks from it anyway, and the gesture is so precisely, absurdly British that she almost laughs. She does not laugh. She opens her own copy of the documentation to the first page and takes out her quill, and they begin.