Evelyn sat across from Sean at the kitchen table. Her heart was pounding. It had felt easy, obvious even, to hug him while he cried in her room, to say they should come back here and talk. It was considerably less easy to know how to begin a conversation that was long overdue, not just belated the week since they had fought and she had left, but for the last half a year.

Sean's eyes were puffy and he still sniffled every few seconds. She had never seen him like this and it made her feel odd, equal parts unsettled and relieved.

"I don't know where to start," he said finally. His voice was thick with ghost tears. "I don't know how to fix this."

Evelyn raked her fingers through her hair, scraping it all over to one side of her head. She looked away from him. She couldn't stop thinking how long it had been since they had had a real conversation of any kind, even an inconsequential one. The "talking" they had done in the last six months barely resembled a conversation.

She felt like she didn't know him anymore.

"Just tell me about your job," she said.

Though she hadn't looked back at him yet, she could feel his reluctance and hesitation to talk about it, could feel that he was gearing up to make some excuse like he had every time she'd tried to talk to him for months.

"I need to understand," she told him. "I need to know how it got this bad." She turned to him now and when they made eye contact, Sean seemed momentarily frozen.

For almost a whole minute, he stared at her with his mouth hovering open, taking these slow, but somehow shallow breaths that only seemed to fill the top of his chest. Then he began to talk. He told her all about how he'd come to get the job through an acquaintance of his father. He told her how it had seemed like a perfect opportunity, a better starting job than most new Hogwarts graduates could ever dream of. He told her how he had been so lost in the first few weeks and no one had offered to help show him what he was supposed to be doing, how his boss had been a world class jerk who purposely put him in situations to make him look stupid, who created schemes that would force Sean to "mess up." How his idea of a joke has been making gross and degrading comments about women. He told her how the seemingly endless hours he'd worked were his attempt to keep above water, to avoid going into yet another meeting to be humiliated. He told her how no one in the office took him seriously, how his boss called him Champ all the time and had made him regret every minute of the Triwizard Tournament, made it feel like some stupid kid game he was overly invested in still.

He told her how the only thing that sometimes got him through the day was when Jenny found an excuse to pop by and they could complain together about the mundanities of office life after seven exciting years at Hogwarts, but how he had never fully opened up to her about just how bad a place he was in, because her perfectly normal entry level position as a secretary (which she had received proper training for as part of her onboarding) was nowhere near the stress level he was experiencing every day. He told her how he had been afraid to complain to Evelyn at first, because she was so worried about finding a job at all and he had this new career that seemed so great on paper. He was afraid of telling her for fear it would get back to his dad who'd gotten him the job in the first place and then he'd look ungrateful at best, or worse, like he wasn't cut out for it which would make his dad look bad to the acquaintance who'd given Sean his in.

He told her how he'd been afraid of admitting to anyone that it was hard, that he needed help, that he didn't know what the hell he was doing any of the time, and not in the overly dramatized way he had sometimes panicked about the tournament, but for real.

He told her how he had been unprepared and naive, and he had been taken advantage of. He had been teased and belittled and used. He had been set up for failure and made to feel so ashamed of himself for not knowing what he was doing that he had cut himself off from the people who might have been able to put some perspective on the situation, or at least who might have recognized that he needed to get out of there much sooner than he had.

Sean talked for well over an hour, giving one scenario after the next as evidence. He stared straight down at the table almost the entire time he talked which made it easier for Evelyn to look at him. Even now, she could see the panic on his face when he talked about what work had been like for him. She could see the dread. His face was pale and his hands shook sometimes, just enough to notice.

Evelyn never interrupted him the whole time he talked, until finally he reached a point in his explanation where she sensed he was gearing up for another round of apologies and suddenly, she didn't want to hear them. He had said he was sorry at her house and she believed him. That was enough.

"Okay," she said finally.

Sean stopped talking abruptly and looked up at her.

"Thank you," she said. "For telling me."

And then before Sean could grovel, she said, "I just want you to know that... I would have understood. It would have been okay to tell me you weren't happy. And the way you've been treating me hurt. A lot."

She kept her eyes on Sean as she said this, even though it was hard to.

"But you are someone I have cared about for a long time and I know you too well to not have suspected there was something else going on." She paused. Her heart was pounding again. What she knew she needed to say next was not something she wanted to say at all. It was something she was afraid to say, because if she said it, there was no taking it back.

"I think," she said quietly. Her mouth was suddenly very dry. "That we should go back to being friends. For now. I think we need to figure out how to be friends again before we..." she trailed off. She felt like crying now. She hadn't cried once since Sean had shown up in her bedroom door, but she felt like it now. She was so tired.

"That's probably smart," said Sean. The tone of his voice made her feel wobbly. "So we're breaking up, then," he added, like she hadn't been clear enough.

Evelyn didn't say yes. Instead, she said, "We haven't really been together for a long time."

—-

Sean said he would sleep on the couch. Evelyn watched from the end of the hall while he took one of his pillows off the bed and laid a blanket out on the couch cushions.

He looked up at her. "You have to work tomorrow?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Okay," said Sean. Neither one of them knew quite how to say goodnight.

They looked past each other until Evelyn took a stilted step toward him and gave him an awkward hug.

"Night," said Sean.

"Night," she said, and then she headed back into the bedroom and shut the door behind her before he could see the tears pooling in her eyes.

She dug through the duffle bag of things she had just brought back, looking for her wand, cast Muffliato on the door so he wouldn't hear her crying, and laid down on her side of the bed. She hadn't slept here in a week and the sheets smelled like Sean. It reminded her of how it had felt to "accidentally" fall asleep in his dormitory all those times, when the four-poster had been his bed and not theirs.

It was strange to think how comfortable she had once been with him, comfortable enough that years before either one of them had hinted at a crush, she had been able to lay her head on his shoulder while they sat on the common room sofa doing homework or demand that he hold her hands when she was cold to warm them up. Comfortable enough that she had slept in his bed without a single romantic inkling from the age of thirteen.

It all felt like such a long time ago.

After a couple of minutes, Evelyn found herself scooting over to his side of the bed. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and told herself again and again that things would get better now. It was hard, still, to believe it.

—-

Usually on a full moon night, Caiti was upset by how quickly her time with Marlowe passed, but today, she found herself anxious to get it over with.

It wasn't that she didn't want to see Marlowe.

It was that she was afraid that spending any amount of time with him would risk her slipping her secret, especially because as soon as she came back, Professor Pym was going to look over the completed draft of her proposal with her. She had about a week to make any corrections, give one more look through, and then she needed to submit it to be sure the owl arrived on time for the deadline.

Caiti was sitting in her office at that very moment, finishing up the potion for Marlowe. It was nearly done. She had a bottle ready to fill and bring to him.

"Why don't you leave your draft with me," said Professor Pym without looking up from the work she was grading on the other side of her desk.

She didn't usually speak to Caiti while she was here. She only worked in her office instead of the classroom because it was less likely that anyone would barge in and distract her.

"I'll look it over while you're gone and have some notes ready to talk about."

Caiti swallowed. "Right," she said. "Sure."

She looked back down at the potion, gave it a few stirs. Another minute or so and it would be just the right shade of green.

"I'm looking forward to reading it," Professor Pym said. "I've seen you working on it all week."

This was true. Caiti had had it out on her desk in class earlier that week to work on in the moments where she was able to let her potion brew without much attention. She had had it in front of her in the Great Hall at nearly every meal. Professor Pym had even passed by her in the library twice that week in the evenings and spied her working on her draft.

In fact, the only time Caiti had allotted to working on it was the roughly twenty minute stretch she devoted to her homework and the time it took her to go and check in on the African Sun Violet before and after classes. It was now eleven inches high and budding.

Keeping one eye on the potion, Caiti reached into her bag and took the draft out. She passed it across the table. Giving it up felt like losing a limb. She had been so attached to it that week. Even in the moments she hadn't been working on it, it had always been with her.

She turned the heat off on the cauldron, stirred the potion a few more times, and used her wand to siphon it from the cauldron to the bottle. The steam curled over the rim in that characteristic way until she had capped it tight.

"See you shortly," said her professor, her eyes already on Caiti's work. She reached for a quill and Caiti's heart pounded. She needed to leave now. It was a good thing Professor Pym was looking over it while she was away. She couldn't have sat there and watched her dissect it.

"Yeah," Caiti said weakly. She took the bottle up in one hand, grabbed a handful of floo powder in the other and stepped into the fireplace.

When she arrived in Marlowe's living room, he was sitting down on the couch, sunk low into the cushions, with a bag of frozen peas for a pillow behind his neck.

"Hi," she said, poking at it as she sat down next to him.

"The muggle muscle recovery method of choice," he explained.

"You should've told me," Caiti said. "I'd've made you something."

Marlowe waved a hand. "It's just because it's a full moon week. I'm always achy."

He sat up enough to take the bottle of wolfsbane potion with Caiti and uncapped it. Steam sprung out the opening and Marlowe set his face before tipping his head back to drink.

Caiti turned her head away, thinking hard.

"You didn't write to me this week," she said, only now realizing it. She had been so caught up in her work.

"Neither did you," said Marlowe. He set the empty bottle down on the end table, grimacing, and Caiti reached to the coffee table in front of them for the glass of water he had ready.

"Thanks," he said when she passed it to him.

"It's been a busy week," she said. "They're killing us with homework now that N.E.W.T.'s are 'right around the corner.'" She added air quotes to this last part. It was true they'd had more homework than normal. It was not true that this was why she'd been busy (although it probably should have been).

"I believe it," said Marlowe. He settled back down against his frozen peas, adjusting them for the most surface coverage. He shut his eyes.

"Honestly, I didn't write you on purpose. Evelyn forbid me from telling you something that I haven't exactly gotten permission to speak to you about yet, but I feel like it's probably okay. I just didn't trust myself not to slip it into a letter."

"What didn't she want you to tell me?" asked Caiti, sitting up and looking at him.

"Well," Marlowe started. "She and Sean got into a pretty big fight. It was bad. She's back there now, which is why I think it's okay to tell you, but she went to her parents' house for almost a week."

"And why didn't she want me to know that?" Caiti demanded. "More importantly, why did you listen to her when she said not to tell me?"

"She thought you'd say something to Sean," Marlowe said.

"I absolutely would have," she said.

"Right, and she didn't want that. She said if they were going to fix it, it had to come from him. She needed to know he'd come on his own."

Caiti sat back against the cushions and crossed her arms.

"You still should have told me anyway," she said. "I hate being out of the loop."

"I was afraid you'd send him a howler if you knew."

"He deserves a howler. He deserves a howler every day till next Christmas. Or longer."

Marlowe laughed.

"What happened?" she asked.

"I don't really know the full details. Evelyn gave me what sounded like a pretty short version. But basically she said she asked him to do something and he was being really rude about it, so she told him how she'd been feeling and he didn't take it particularly well. She went outside, sat out there a long time, he didn't come out... so she left." He paused. "That was like a week ago. Sean sent me an owl this morning asking when I'd be free. He didn't say much, but he said they were talking again and he wanted to talk to me, too. That's the only reason I know she's back home. I only knew it had happened at all because her friend Margaret from work sent me an owl to go check on her."

"I honestly don't know how she can forgive him."

"I don't think she really has," Marlowe said. "I think they broke up."

At those words, Caiti reached for Marlowe's hand. "I never would have seen something like this coming," she said. "Not in a million years. I don't know what happened to him."

"Neither do I," said Marlowe.

"Well, when you talk to him, you better update me this time."

"I will," he said. "He might write you soon, too. You never know."

"I'm just his sister. I'm last priority."

"Not to me," said Marlowe.

Caiti squeezed his hand.

"But what about you? Anything exciting going on at Hogwarts?" Marlowe asked. "Or is it just N.E.W.T. frenzy?"

"Not much," Caiti said. "Apparently Professor Mason's having a kid. Or his girlfriend is anyway. Someone who stayed at school over the holiday said she came to the school again and looked pregnant, but everyone's too afraid to ask him to confirm it because they don't want him to get offended if she isn't. But other than that, there's really nothing of note happening."

"I can't picture him as a dad," Marlowe said.

"Weirdly, I can. He's changed a lot."

"Who's the girlfriend again?"

"She's an auror. I don't remember her name. She's really pretty though. She came to the Hufflepuff-Ravenclaw game in the spring."

"Who'd have thought," said Marlowe, frowning. "Professor Mason, dropping the tough teacher act and having a baby."

"His class is my second favorite now," she said. "Because every time someone asks about her, he gets off track for like twenty minutes so I just zone out and work on my homework."

Caiti caught herself just in time to get this sentence out without sounding suspicious. It wasn't her homework she was working on in those extra minutes, but Marlowe didn't need to know that. She thought about Professor Pym, back at the school and looking over Caiti's proposal, and her stomach jumped.

Marlowe said something else, but Caiti was already distracted. It was hard to focus on being here now she'd remembered what else was going on.

"Sorry, what?" she asked. "Speaking of zoning out, I just..."

"Nothing important," said Marlowe with an easy shrug.

He removed the frozen peas from behind his neck, reached back — face quirking in discomfort as he squeezed at the muscles in his shoulders — and said, "I should head out there soon. It gets dark so early."

Caiti turned and looked at him. "What's the countdown at?" she asked quietly.

"One forty something? I don't know. I'm not sure I trust the charm."

"I don't think you should. It was working okay at first, but mine said five hundred thirteen yesterday and six this morning."

"Damn it. Maybe I did it wrong."

"Or maybe it just wears off."

"I'll go back to the daily updates," he said. "Now that I can trust myself to write you without spilling the beans."

For some reason, this phrase struck Caiti as the funniest thing she had heard in weeks and she started to giggle, just a little at first, but once Marlowe started to smile too, it picked up until she was laughing so hard no sound was coming out and she could hardly breathe. Her stomach ached with the effort.

Marlowe had this bemused look on his face like he didn't have a clue what she was even laughing at, but he kept on laughing too. Laughter had always been a contagious thing between the two of them. If one started, the other followed suit. It had been that way as long as she'd known him.

When she'd started to quiet, still giggling a bit every few seconds, she wiped the tears out of her eyes and leaned over to hug Marlowe. "Love you," she said.

"Love you too," he said, and he kissed her on the cheek.

She pulled back to kiss him on the mouth, smiling at the way he smiled.

He hugged her one more time before he stood up. "Thanks for this," he said, handing the empty bottle back to her. "And just for coming. You always make me feel better when my body feels crap."

Caiti stood up with him, and crossed her arms. She looked down at the floor. "Course," she said. Then she added, "Miss you already."

"Yeah," Marlowe agreed. "Me too." He kissed her one more time before he headed for the door and Caiti reached above the fireplace for the floo powder. As soon as the door had shut behind him, her heart started pounding again. It was time to find out what Professor Pym thought.

—-

Caiti's eyes went wide when she saw how much Professor Pym had written on her draft.

"A lot of it's good," said Professor Pym, pushing the paper across the desk. Caiti sunk down in the chair, not sure she believed this. She saw a lot of red ink. "I made notes about what's working and what you should keep."

Cautiously, Caiti pulled the paper closer to her and started to look it over. The first section is good, but I think it could be more concise. You want them to get to the end, because that's where the good stuff is, so we want those first few bits to be relatively efficient. I don't want you to leave anything out, just say it in as few words as possible without sacrificing meaning. I've made a few suggestions on the side about how to abbreviate a bit."

She paused and let Caiti glance over everything. She started to relax a bit. The notes were detailed, but they weren't harsh. In fact, they were pretty smart. Caiti could already see the shape of each paragraph a little more clearly and she hadn't even made the edits yet.

She dragged her finger down the page as she read over the next section of notes.

"So there's where you're getting into more of the content," said Professor Pym. "And the methodology I think is going to be the most important section except maybe the bit at the end about what you plan to do to continue your research. I've made a few specific comments here and there, but mostly I just made a list of questions on the side that a reader might ask. I know the answer to some of them already, because I'm familiar with what you're doing and I've talked to you about it, but I was trying to think from the lens of someone who's never spoken to you. We don't want to assume they know anything about what you're doing so hopefully those questions will help you fill in the gaps and make it as thorough as you can."

"Right," said Caiti distantly. It was hard to listen to Professor Pym at the same time as reading her comments, because Caiti's head was already spinning with ideas. She had answers to these questions, and knowing that felt exciting. She still felt like she was stabbing blindly in the dark most of the time, but knowing that there was some element of organization and purpose to what she was doing, more than she'd realized she had... it bolstered her.

When she turned to the final page a few minutes later, Professor Pym didn't say anything, just let Caiti look at the notes she'd made. How is this research going to be important on a larger scale? You've addressed your personal connection in the beginning, but what about beyond that? Make everyone care as much as you do.

It was all she'd said. There were one or two small markups in the actual text — word choice and that sort of thing — but otherwise, the end was left untouched except for that question.

Caiti stared at it for a long, long time and Professor Pym did not interrupt her thoughts.

This was something she truly hadn't considered. She'd obviously started this research because of Marlowe. She'd continued it mostly because it was something to do and to focus on. It kept her from feeling lonely. She'd taken it seriously because she'd been told it was worthwhile.

Caiti looked up and Professor Pym just gave her a little smile.

"Do you have questions about anything?"

Caiti looked back at the paper. Slowly, she shook her head.

"Okay. Well if any come up, you know where to find me. Why don't we plan to meet again on Monday evening and look it over again after you've had some time to polish it."

"Okay," said Caiti. "Monday."

"It's good, Caiti. It's very good. You don't sound like a student."

Caiti pressed her lips together. Her eyes felt a little glassy and she didn't want to say anything until she was certain her voice would be under control. "Thanks," she said finally.

Professor Pym just pushed her chair back and stood up, and Caiti knew she was dismissed.