Turn 27 of 36

Spend the evening in the kitchen together — cook a shared meal, leave the evidence

Hermione stands. The binding magic is still warm from the drawer, from his bedroom, from the act of placing her photographs on his dresser and walking away, and she is tired of carrying warmth back to her room and sitting with it alone. She is tired of the distance. She is tired of treating the flat like a stage set they dress and then retreat from, and the inspection is tomorrow and the documentation says inspectors will look for signs of genuine cohabitation including personal effects and shared meals, and there is no shared meal in this kitchen. There are two chairs at a table and charity shop plates and nothing on the stove.

She walks to the kitchen. She opens the icebox — empty, because neither of them has thought to fill it — and stands in the cold light of it and thinks. Then she puts on her coat and walks to the Sainsbury's on the corner and comes back with two chicken breasts, a bag of carrots, an onion, a bulb of garlic, a tin of stock, and a packet of pasta that she chose because it was cheap and because Draco Malfoy has probably never cooked a meal in his life and pasta is forgiving.

She is chopping carrots when she hears his door open. Footsteps in the hall. He appears in the kitchen doorway in shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and his hair slightly dishevelled from what she assumes was an afternoon spent arranging and rearranging his wardrobe, and he looks at the cutting board and the vegetables and the tin of stock and says nothing for a long moment.

"You are cooking."

"I am making dinner. There is a difference."

He stands in the doorway. She can feel the binding magic shift — a gentle, steady pull, like a tide finding its level. She does not invite him in. She does not need to. The kitchen is narrow and long and there is only one way to be in it, which is together. After a moment he crosses to the sink and washes his hands and takes the onion from the counter and reaches past her for the second knife.

They do not speak for several minutes. He cuts the onion into neat, even squares — finer than she would have done, more precise, the knife work of someone who has been taught to do everything with exactness even if he has never been taught to cook. She takes the garlic. The kitchen fills with the smell of it, raw and sharp, and she heats oil in the pan and the onion hits the surface with a hiss and Draco is standing close enough that she can feel the warmth of his arm beside hers, and the binding magic hums low and content.

"Can you manage the chicken?" she asks.

"I can manage the chicken."

He takes the cutting board and she moves to the stove and they work around each other in the narrow kitchen with the ease of people who have never shared a space but are learning its geography — she at the burner, he at the counter, passing the salt, reaching past for the stock tin, stepping back to let her open the oven. The pasta goes into the pot. The chicken goes into the pan. The carrots go in with the onion and the garlic and the kitchen is warm and smells like food and the window over the sink is dark with evening and somewhere outside Penelope Clearwater may or may not be watching but in here, in this room, two people are cooking a meal together and it looks like a marriage.

"The inspector will check the icebox," Draco says, watching the chicken brown. "And the sink. And the waste bin."

"I know."

"They will look for two portions. Two plates used. Two glasses. Evidence that more than one person ate here regularly."

"Then we leave the evidence."

They eat at the table. The pasta is slightly overcooked and the chicken is slightly dry and the carrots are the best thing on the plate because Hermione knows how to roast carrots and Draco, it turns out, knows how to season them — salt, pepper, a pinch of something from a jar he produced from his leather case without explanation. They eat in silence. Not the cold silence of the café after Penelope left. A different silence. A kitchen silence. The kind that belongs to two people sharing a meal they made together in a room that smells like garlic and is warm from the stove and is, for this hour, theirs.

After dinner, Hermione washes. Draco dries. Their hands do not touch over the sink but they move in the same rhythm, plate and cloth and rack, and when the last dish is done and the kitchen is clean and the evidence of a shared meal is stacked on the drying rack and the table still holds the faint ring of two glasses on its surface, Hermione turns and finds Draco standing by the window, looking out at the dark street below.

"Tomorrow," she says.

"Tomorrow," he agrees. He does not turn from the window. The mask is not fully in place. She can see the edge of something in the set of his shoulders — tension, or awareness, or the weight of a man who has just cooked a meal in a kitchen he shares with a woman he was taught to despise and cannot quite find his way back to the despising.

Hermione leaves him at the window. She walks to her room and closes the door and sits on the edge of her bed and presses her hand to her sternum where the binding magic pulses, warm and steady, and she thinks about the sound of his knife on the cutting board and the way he dried the plates without being asked and the pinch of whatever he put on the carrots, and she does not know what to do with the feeling in her chest except sit with it and let it be what it is, unnamed and unexamined, and breathe through it until sleep comes.