Turn 23 of 36

Hermione is reaching for her parchment when the café door opens and a cold draft cuts across the room. She does not look up immediately. She is still thinking about eleven o'clock, about flats with two bedrooms, about the way the binding magic has gone quiet and warm. Then Draco's arm goes rigid on her shoulder — not withdrawn, not relaxed, but locked, every muscle pulled taut — and she looks up.

A witch in Ministry robes is standing at the counter. She is not ordering. She is not looking at the menu board. She is holding a clipboard and scanning the café with the efficient, disinterested gaze of someone conducting a checklist, and her eyes land on the corner table and stay there. Hermione recognises her — Penelope Clearwater, now attached to the Cohabitation Compliance Office, a transfer Hermione had not heard about until this exact second. Penelope's gaze moves from Draco's arm on Hermione's shoulder to the portfolio open on the table to the documentation pages fanned between them, and her expression shifts into something professional and pitying that makes Hermione's stomach drop.

Penelope crosses the café. She does not hurry. She stops at their table and looks at Draco's arm, still on Hermione's shoulder, and says, "I'm sorry to interrupt. I've been assigned to monitor initial compliance for the new cohabitation cases. I need to log this meeting."

"You need to log — we are in a Muggle café," Hermione says, and her voice is steady but her hand has clenched around her quill hard enough to splinter the shaft. "This is not a public appearance. This is a private conversation."

"The revised timeline requires documentation of mutual cooperation toward cohabitation. Any meeting between the parties counts. I'm sorry, Hermione." Penelope's voice is gentle and that makes it worse.

"I need to note the date, location, and — " she glances at Draco's arm again, " — observable indicators of accord."

Draco removes his arm from Hermione's shoulder. The motion is controlled, deliberate, and the binding magic flares cold for the first time — a sharp, sudden absence, like a door slamming shut. Hermione feels it in her ribs and understands, with a clarity that makes her throat tight, that the warmth they built in the last hour has just been recorded, catalogued, and turned into evidence. The touch she asked for and he chose is now a data point in a Ministry file.

"How long have you been assigned to us?" Draco asks. His voice is perfectly neutral. His face is perfectly blank. The mask is back and it came up the instant Penelope said the word *log*, and Hermione watches it reinstall itself like a portcullis dropping and she understands — with a sickness that sits low in her stomach — that the Ministry has just taken the one thing that was theirs and made it property of the state.

Penelope writes something on her clipboard.

"Since this morning. The Compliance Office is monitoring all arranged unions. I won't be the only observer."

She leaves. The café door closes behind her and the draft follows her out and the table is cold where the warmth was. Draco's hands are flat on the table, very still. His knuckles are white.