There was a big product launch coming up the following week and it had everyone in the office working overtime, which meant that Sean, who always worked overtime, could have worked through the night all week long and still wouldn't have been caught up. He had acquired a taste for coffee he'd never had before out of sheer necessity.

Evelyn had commented on this when he'd brought a bag of grounds home a few days previously. She'd come into the kitchen to make breakfast, not yet showered or dressed for the day, while he flicked his wand to fill his travel mug and had paused and said, "I didn't know you liked coffee."

For some reason, this comment irked him to no end. He had barely responded in the moment, but he had fumed about it for hours afterward, which only made him think how, had he confided in her, Evelyn would have told him it was nothing to waste his energy feeling angry about. Knowing this would be her response only made him angrier.

Evelyn didn't get it. Not anymore. She always had before, but she wouldn't now. She couldn't. She would downplay everything he was dealing with and come up with simple, obvious solutions to make everything better, and none of them would be remotely plausible, but she would go on in that perfectly calm, superior way she had always used to show off how grown up she was compared to everyone else.

All the things he had always appreciated about Evelyn were suddenly the things he couldn't stand. It was easier to be mad at something he knew well than to be mad at something he didn't understand at all. That was the truth of it.

And Sean knew it.

He just wouldn't let himself think about it.

So he went on fuming, letting his irritation be a constant soundtrack to accompany the endless piles of work he was stumbling his way through day after day.

Rhett came in at about four in the afternoon. "Hey there, Champ," he said. "Wrapping up for the night?"

Sean couldn't even justify this question with a response. He was so obviously behind. He'd been getting all manner of guilt-trips and pressure all week long for not having checked off every box people kept dumping onto his overpopulated to-do list.

"Just checking in on that engagement report," he said. "We really need that in by tomorrow morning."

"Right," said Sean. "i'll have it done."

"Good man," said Rhett, clapping Sean on the back, and he left again. Sean heard him calling goodnights to everyone else as he went down the hall on his way out. Sean put his head down on the desk and allowed himself two entire minutes to vent to himself and then he sat up and got back to work.

—-

When Sean finally got home, Evelyn was in bed again. She had been sitting up, covers pulled up over her legs and knees tucked up to her chest, staring at the wall next to the door. Her head felt so blank and empty, she didn't think a single coherent thought had passed through it in the last hour. Not until the moment she heard the crack of apparation as Sean arrived. She quickly reached for her book and flipped open to where she'd left off, but she only pretended to be reading when Sean came in.

She said a small, "Hi," but didn't comment on how late he'd gotten back. She knew better than that now. She knew better than to ask how his day had been, too.

"Hi," said Sean, but he barely looked at her. Evelyn stared at the same page in her book the whole while that Sean got ready for bed and laid out his clothes for work the next day. She waited until he started heading for the bed to close it and put it back on the nightstand, no further along than she had been when she picked it up.

Tentatively, she scooted a little closer to Sean when he sat down and pulled him into a hug. He let her, even wrapping his own arms around her waist, and for just a second she thought he might be about to say something real, but all that came out was goodnight, and he let go and laid back down.

Evelyn lay back on the pillows. They were closer than usual. For quite a while now, they had kept pretty clearly to their own sides. Sean reached his hand over and laid it atop hers. He didn't hold it, didn't intertwine their fingers, just laid it there. Evelyn's heart started to beat very, very fast.

For several minutes, she lay perfectly still and tried to convince herself to work up the courage to flip her palm around so she could clasp his fingers. But just when she started to move her hand, Sean pulled his back and rolled over facing away from her. Evelyn wanted to give herself a good punch in the face. It was the first time in so long that he had initiated any sort of contact other than a perfunctory kiss hello or goodnight.

After a minute, she rolled onto her side, too, pulling the covers up under her chin. It should have been so easy to hold his hand. It should have been so natural. But the thought of trying it had terrified her.

—-

In only the last couple of days, Caiti had made about seventeen pages of notes on the Herbert Snyder book. Lists of plants with similar properties or uses, copious notes on the ones that seemed relatively promising, more lists of plants that were mentioned but not otherwise elaborated on. She was poring over the notes now, trying to decipher what might be worth looking into. So many of the plants were ones she had used a thousand times. It didn't seem likely that any of them, common as they were, would be the miraculous ingredient that Damocles Belby had somehow not used correctly.

The plants she had written down at mention only seemed the best bet. These were ones that weren't, as the title of the book had suggested, "Garden Variety" plants. One of them in particular stuck out to her, only because she had skimmed past the name about three weeks prior in a book she had checked out, with permission from Professor Pym, from the restricted section on very rare and sometimes terribly dangerous herbs and fungi from across the world.

The book had actually been for their work peer-reviewing new potion recipes, but she had hung onto it on the off chance there was something of use. She flipped to the index of the book now and started scanning for the plants on her list, crossing them off one by one when they had nothing promising in their descriptions.

But her lists were long and scattered across many pages in her notebook so the process was messy and convoluted. It took her days of searching near constantly before she finally came across something useful while browsing through under her desk in Defense Against the Dark Arts. Her classmates had gotten Professor Mason off topic again speculating about his girlfriend. He had let slip that she might come to the Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff quidditch match, and they were all the sudden emotionally invested in knowing everything there was to know about her.

Caiti wasn't paying attention to that at all. She read through the paragraph six times in a row to make sure she hadn't invented what she was reading. It had to be wishful thinking. The properties of this particular ingredient were so promising, so possibly perfect there was no way it actually existed.

But there it was, right on the page. A rare and very difficult to grow flower commonly called the Sun Violet, because it looked very much like the non-magical African violet except that it wasn't purple at all, but bright yellow. Originally found in Angola and Namibia, it was now nearly obsolete except for the efforts of a few magical herbologists working to study, conserve, and propagate the plant in their greenhouses. They were located in a remote part of Namibia.

No potions in regular use called for it anymore, but it had once been used in a potion that forced a person using the Polyjuice potion to turn back into themselves ahead of the hour. As there were spells that did such a thing now, the potion was quite unnecessary. A spell was much less costly, not to mention quicker.

But that didn't matter to Caiti. What mattered was that it had been the key ingredient in a potion that had un-transfigured someone, and that was about as close to an ingredient that would stop someone from transforming as Caiti expected to get.

Her head spun. It was Tuesday. She had herbology the following morning, which meant she could ask Professor Munslow if he knew anything about it, but that left her with almost seventeen hours of time she would have to fill without learning more and Caiti didn't think she could handle that without at least doing something.

She looked back at the short paragraph in the book and read it another time. Three herboogists were listed as species experts, all working together in a southern Angola to study the plant. The book was somewhat dated, but it wasn't terribly old. It wasn't impossible that they were still around and actively researching.

"Alright, alright, enough of that. You can ask her yourself next weekend. I'm sure she'll be horrified to meet the lot of you," Professor Mason was saying at the front of the room.

Caiti looked up, the classroom swimming back into view. She'd almost forgotten where she was. She hurried to stick a bit of parchment in the book to mark her page and then shoved it back in her bag before Professor Mason could confiscate it to get her back on task.

Maybe she could write a letter asking for some further research and resources on the subject, she thought. Or maybe she was putting too much stock in this particular plant and she needed to start looking into the potion it had been used in first.

But she couldn't think on it much more. Professor Mason was passing something out and putting them into pairs. Reluctantly, Caiti wrenched her mind back to class.

—-

At seven o'clock that night, Caiti headed into Professor Pym's office. "Hi," she said, dropping her bag on the ground as she took her usual seat.

"Hi, Caiti," she smiled. She took a minute to finish up writing a comment of some kid's essay and then pushed her stack of parchment to the side to clear the desk. "We've got an updated recipe including some of the suggestions we submitted," she said, sliding a letter in between them. "I do want to try brewing that tonight and we'll draft another response, but before we get into that, I want to check in with you. How's your research going? Is there anything I can help guide you with right now?"

Caiti hesitated. Her new line of inquiry was still such a fledgling thought. She was almost afraid to voice it out loud for fear it might turn out to be nothing of use. Like on her seventh birthday when she had said her wish out loud and Sean had told her that if you told everyone your wish it wouldn't come true. She had cried for two hours and Sean hadn't been allowed to have any cake.

"Well," Caiti said cautiously, "I came across something today, actually." She reached into her bag for the moldy old book from the restricted section and flipped it open to the page she had marked. "It might be nothing, but..." She turned the book towards her professor and pointed to the short little paragraph.

"I thought that the potion this was used in sounded interesting. I've never heard of it and it doesn't sound like it's been in use for quite a long time so it might not even be possible to find a recipe or anything about it, but I thought maybe I could..." She trailed off, hoping maybe Professor Pym would fill in the end of her sentence, but she didn't. She rarely did. She always waited to see what else her students would provide if she didn't fill in the gaps for them.

"I guess I'm just not sure," said Caiti, "If I should try to reach out to any of these herbologists who might be working with this plant or if I should just focus on trying to learn more about the potion."

Professor Pym nodded slowly. "Why can't you do both?" she asked. "It might take you a few days to get a letter back. This research is being done in..." she looked back at the book. "Namibia. I wouldn't think an owl could travel that far and back in sooner than a week. Two maybe. You write a letter now, and see what you can find out about the potion in the meantime. I'll see if i can look through the catalog for the restricted section and pull anything that might be useful for you."

"Okay," said Caiti. She inhaled and nodded. "Okay. Great. I'll do it. Thank you."

"Of course," said Professor Pym. "If you want to run your letter past me before you send it, I'd be happy to look it over."

"Okay," said Caiti. "I will."

She smiled and waited patiently for a few moments, just in case Caiti had anything else to say or to ask. "Well, shall we get started then?"

"Yes," Caiit nodded. It would be good, she thought, to focus on following a recipe. It would help clear her head.