The witch of privet drive

The letter comes with the milk. You find it wedged between the bottles on the doorstep — heavy cream parchment, an emerald-ink address in a hand that makes your scar fingertip-tingle, and a wax seal showing a lion, an eagle, a snake and a badger arranged around a big bold H. Upstairs, the shower is running, and over the water you can hear your aunt singing something from Cabaret, badly and with great conviction.

You carry it into the kitchen, where the house already smells of toast and Petunia's desperation-for-caffeine. Seventeen years you've lived at Number 4, the niece nobody in this street can quite explain — the Evans girl's sister's kid, no father ever mentioned, came to stay after 'the accident' and never left. Nobody in Little Whinging asks questions anymore, mostly because Petunia can out-gossip, out-dress and out-stare any of them into silence.

The envelope says: Miss I. Potter, The Smallest Bedroom, 4 Privet Drive. Your aunt chose that address herself, once, as a joke. You turn the letter over, heart hammering, and decide whether to wait for her or open it in the hall before the toast burns.