Turn 26 of 36
They sign the lease on Thursday afternoon. Ruth takes their details — Hermione's real name and a plausible Muggle surname for Draco that he produces without hesitation — and the deposit clears through a Gringotts-to-Barclays transfer that Hermione has spent two days arranging with a goblin named Griphook's nephew, and by five o'clock they hold a set of keys to a flat in Bloomsbury that belongs to neither of them and both of them and the Ministry that is watching.
Friday is moving. Hermione arrives with two trunks, a box of books, and a Muggle kettle she refuses to live without. She takes the bedroom at the back of the flat — smaller, quieter, facing the garden of the terrace behind. She does not ask Draco which room he wants. She simply takes hers and sets her trunk at the foot of the bed and stands in the empty room with the binding magic pulling warm and steady and thinks: this is where I will sleep while pretending to sleep beside him.
Draco arrives an hour later. He carries a single leather case and a wardrobe trunk that he shrinks in the entryway and expands in the front bedroom without speaking. Hermione hears him moving through the flat — the creak of floorboards, the click of a latch, the brief silence of a man standing in a room he has been assigned and deciding how to inhabit it. He does not knock on her door. She does not knock on his.
They spend the weekend constructing the appearance of a marriage. The living room gets a sofa — neutral, grey, chosen from a Muggle catalogue in a silence that lasts forty minutes because neither of them will be the first to say *that one* and neither of them will say *I do not care*. They compromise on the second page. The kitchen gets a table, two chairs, a set of plates that Hermione buys from a charity shop on Lamb's Conduit Street because they are plain and cheap and because buying plates with Draco Malfoy in a charity shop is an act of defiance so specific she almost smiles.
The bedroom is the problem. The documentation requires it to present as shared, and the bedroom in question is Draco's, because his is larger and faces the street and will be the one an inspector enters first. Hermione stands in the doorway on Sunday morning with a stack of charmed photographs — her parents, her friends, a view of the Hogwarts library that she has kept since sixth year — and watches Draco clear a drawer from his wardrobe and set it on the bed.
"For your things," he says. He does not look at her. He is arranging his own clothing in the wardrobe with the mechanical precision of someone dismantling a bomb.
"The inspector will open it. It should not be empty."
She puts the photographs on the dresser. She puts a jumper in the drawer. She stands in his bedroom with her hand on the open drawer and the binding magic is so warm it is almost audible, a low hum beneath her ribs, and the room looks like two people share it and one of them is her and she does not know what to do with the feeling that rises in her chest except carry it back to her own room and close the door and sit on the edge of her bed and press her hand against her sternum where the magic pulses and breathe.
The first inspection is Tuesday. They have one day left.