She came home with hospital salt on her tongue.
The corridor of Greengrass Manor smelled like dust and polish. The portraits along the walls whispered to one another in low, crackling tones, gossip carried through oil and frame. Word was that Lady Greengrass had finally left the house. Her coat felt too heavy on her shoulders. The Healer at St Mungo's had spoken in careful sentences. Names for things. Steps to take. None of it changed the ache behind her eyes, or the way the lift stopped on every floor as if the building itself couldn't bear to rise all at once.
Daphne set her parchment on the hall table and didn't look at it. She'd already read the same words four times in the atrium, had already folded the edges until they were soft. She stood still and let the house breathe around her. The mirrors didn't complain. The air had that quiet that used to feel like safety and now felt like a held note.
Somewhere, a clock struck. Thin. Precise.
She went to the drawing room. The fire was low. The tray the elf had left that morning still held a cup with a skin of tea on top. Daphne touched the porcelain with two fingers. Cold. She rubbed at the heel of one eye and felt the sting again, not the flood of St Mungo's, just the reminder. The raw edge where the Healer's voice had hooked.
There was ash in the grate from the Prophet she'd burned yesterday. She nudged it with the poker until it sifted down. When she straightened, the room turned green.
Floo powder shimmered in the fireplace. A shape, then boots, then Pansy stepped out, brushing soot from a coat that didn't have any. Her perfume cut the air, clean, sharp, expensive. She had a scarf looped at her throat, blue and gold, the colours bright against the black wool.
"Merlin's sake," Pansy said, taking her in. "You look like you lost a fight with your own reflection."
Daphne blinked once. "Hello to you too."
Pansy's gaze slid to the cup, to the grate, back to Daphne's face. The edge in her mouth softened by a fraction. She crossed the room, caught Daphne's chin in her hand, tilted her face toward the light. "Eyes," she said. "Red. That explains the aura of doom."
"St Mungo's," Daphne said quietly.
"I know." Pansy didn't ask how it went. She didn't say she was sorry. She pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and swiped under Daphne's right eye with a neat thumb. "Smudged."
Daphne stood there and let her. It felt like being twelve again, Pansy fixing a ribbon before Transfiguration. It felt domestic in a way that hurt.
Pansy tucked the handkerchief away and stepped back. She lifted the scarf with two fingers as if presenting evidence. "Look."
"What am I looking at?"
"Patriotism," Pansy said. "Or idiocy. Depending on your mood." She spun the end of the scarf and let it fall. "We're going out."
"I'm not," Daphne said.
"You are," Pansy replied, light as air. "You don't have to be seen. You only have to see. There's a difference."
Daphne stared at the fire. The thought of a crowd made her throat tighten, the thought of noise pressed against her ears. "Where."
"Quidditch," Pansy said, almost cheerful. "The national side. Your husband's circus. He's coaching against Ireland and rumour says he's one Bludger away from a scandal that'll make Skeeter salivate for a month. I brought a scarf. I didn't bring patience."
Daphne closed her eyes for a moment. He's not my husband, she almost said, except he was, on parchment and in rooms where eyes watched. He was also the man who had left a warming charm under a door when he couldn't stay. She tasted smoke, opened her eyes again.
"I'm not ready," she said.
Pansy's tone softened, but her edge stayed. "You cried," she said. "Now you'll do something else." She reached for Daphne's coat draped over the arm of a chair, holding it open. "Put this on. You can hate me later."
Daphne didn't move.
Pansy's mouth flattened. She came close again, framing Daphne's face in both hands. Her palms were cool. Her voice dropped. "You don't have to be brave with me. You don't have to like any of this. You can stand at the top of the stands where no one looks and leave after five minutes if you want. But you can't keep letting silence choose for you." A beat. "Come on."
It was bossy, unkind in the way only friends can be when kindness fails. Daphne breathed out. She pushed her arms into the sleeves. The fabric dragged on her wrists like water. She tied her hair back without looking and took Pansy's scarf when Pansy tried to drape it over her own shoulders.
"Not blue," Daphne said.
Pansy's mouth twitched. "Fine. I'll be patriotic for both of us."
They took the Floo from the manor, green and heat and the taste of bitter herbs. They stepped into the stadium atrium and the noise hit like wind.
It was the kind of sound you felt in your ribs, metal, voices, the scrape of brooms over stone. Vendors with floating trays called out names of snacks Daphne didn't recognise. The air had rain in it. The ceiling hung high and draped with banners that rippled on their own. Gold letters spelled names she knew even if she pretended she didn't.
Pansy took her elbow and steered. "Private box," she said. "Parkinson charity owns one. Useful things, charities. Come on."
They climbed a narrow stair that kept the crowd below and spilled into a small room with glass on one side and a row of seats on the other. The pitch spread below them in strict lines. The stands curved like a full bowl. Team robes streaked across the sky, colours bright against grey. The national blue cut across green like a blade.
Daphne stood with her hands on the rail and let her body learn the shape of the noise. It didn't drown her. It knocked once at the door of her chest, then settled into a rhythm she could recognise.
On the near touchline, Oliver Wood paced.
He wore the national jacket open over a dark jumper. The collar bent where he'd clawed at it. His jaw had the kind of roughness that meant he'd taken a blade to it without caring about the result. His hair had lost whatever war he'd fought with his hands. He looked like a man who'd slept every night by her door and never once gone inside.
He had a clipboard in his right hand and a whistle at his throat that he didn't use. He didn't look up at the boxes. He walked to the end of the line of substitutes, bent, said something sharp that made a young Chaser blink and nod too fast. Then he turned and stalked towards the fourth official with the clipped impatience of someone who needed a fight to feel alive.
Daphne's fingers tightened on the rail.
Pansy leaned beside her, scarf bright, eyes brighter. "He looks dreadful," she said with a kind of satisfaction that was worry in better clothes. "This will be entertaining."
The referee blew to start. Players rose. Bludgers shot from their restraints with a sound like teeth snapping. The Quaffle lifted as if curious. The world moved.
Daphne watched him, not the ball. She watched the way he stood with his feet set too wide, as if bracing against a wind no one else felt. The way his mouth worked when a pass landed wrong, that barely contained bite. He'd always had it, even when he laughed. He used to hide it behind humour. She remembered the smirk he'd give her across a kitchen when he couldn't cook, the way he'd said princess like a provocation and a plea at once. Mornings when he came in from practice soaked through and left wet prints on her floor on purpose, until she pushed him with her foot and he caught her ankle with warm hands and pressed his mouth to the inside of her knee without ceremony.
She let the memory run to the door and stop there. She kept her eyes on the man on the touchline.
The first ten minutes were clean. Ireland pressed. The national side held. Oliver shouted short phrases that cut through rain, the voice of someone used to being heard. He didn't look up to see if anyone listened.
Pansy found a paper bag on the side table, discovered it was charmed to refill with sugared nuts, and ate with elegance. "Wager," she said softly. "He's sent off before half-time."
Daphne didn't answer.
An Irish Beater clipped a blue Seeker's shoulder. Oliver flinched like a man hit himself. He stalked towards the line and said something to the assistant that made the assistant look at the fourth official. The fourth official shook his head once. Oliver laughed without humour and shoved his hands into his pockets like a boy who didn't know what else to do with them.
The game tightened. The sky darkened. The rain turned from suggestion to fact. Brooms cut lines through wet air. The crowd leaned forward in one body. The other coach, a compact wizard with tidy hair and a tidy temper, said something across the technical area that Daphne couldn't hear. Oliver heard it. He turned his head slowly, and his smile showed a tooth that wasn't friendly.
The next sequence broke like a plate.
A blue Chaser took the Quaffle hard along the right. An Irish Beater came late and high. The Chaser spun and held, but the shoulder went wrong. Oliver was already moving. He was on the grass before the Healer, a snarl and a hand out. The fourth official snapped a charm at his feet that fizzed and pushed and meant, stop.
He didn't stop.
He got the Chaser to the line, gave instructions in a voice that shook the rain. Then he looked up and saw the opposing coach laughing with his assistant, and something inside him tore in a way Daphne could see from two floors up.
He didn't cast. That would have been an immediate ban, and he hadn't yet forgotten the rules. He did something worse. He strode to the rack of practice Bludgers the ball boys kept charmed in place, put one hand on the housing and said a word the charm didn't like. The metal ring jumped. The Bludger shivered like a dog at a bath. It snapped free.
It went straight as an insult.
Not at a player. At the feet of the opposing coach. Hard enough to make him stumble back and swear. Hard enough that only a fast guard charm from the fourth official kept it from slamming a shin to bone.
The stadium made one sound, then none, the kind of quiet that comes after glass breaks.
The referee was at the touchline in seconds, wand raised. The rune flared red by Oliver's boots. The meaning was universal. Expelled. The rain didn't care. It kept falling. The crowd found its voice again, and it wasn't kind.
Oliver didn't argue. That, somehow, was worse. He stood there, took the charm on his wrist that meant he couldn't cross the technical line again. He nodded once at the assistant who had to take over, turned and walked toward the tunnel, jaw set, eyes on nothing. Two cameras followed him like flies. He didn't look up at the boxes. He didn't look for her.
Daphne realised she'd been holding her breath. She let it out, and it stung her throat.
Pansy dusted sugar from her fingers. "I win," she said, softer than before. Then, after a beat, "He's a spectacular idiot."
Daphne kept watching the tunnel until the dark swallowed the back of his head. She could still hear him in the way the crowd muttered. She could hear him in her own body, in the absence he'd left in the space where he'd stood.
The rest of the half played itself out in a way that didn't matter. She could have told you who scored. She couldn't have told you the shape of the goal. She saw blue against green and rain against glass. She saw the line where the officials stood, heads close, rules spoken like scripture. She saw the hole on the touchline where a man should be.
Pansy ate another nut and gave up pretending to enjoy the match. She angled her body toward Daphne and watched her instead. The scarf was bright at her throat. The look in her eyes wasn't bright at all.
At the whistle for half-time, the crowd stood like a tide and moved. Vendors called again. The sound rose and dipped. A brass band tried to throw cheer into the break, and the tune fell flat against the rain.
Pansy touched Daphne's sleeve. "We can leave," she said.
Daphne kept her hand on the rail. The metal was slick. The cold ran up through her palm into her arm. She thought of the warming charm under a door in a corridor she hadn't stepped through. She thought of a Healer telling her that grief isn't a test to pass, not a debt to pay, not a performance for an audience. It is a wound in living tissue, she'd said. It bleeds when it bleeds. We clean it. We don't punish it.
Daphne looked at the tunnel again. "No," she said.
Pansy's head tipped, a question and a yes.
"I'm going to see him," Daphne said.
It landed quiet between them. Not a vow. Not a threat. Something else. Direction.
Pansy's mouth opened, surprise, then relief, then something like pride. It changed her face in a way Daphne hadn't seen in weeks. "Good," she said. The single word felt like a hand at the small of Daphne's back, not pushing, just there.
Daphne stepped away from the glass. She picked up her coat but didn't put it on. The light in the room made the rain look like silver wire. The air smelled of sugar and wet wool and memory. She crossed to the door.
Pansy fell in beside her without fuss. "Players' tunnel is that way," she said. "You can use the Parkinson pass. If anyone asks, glare and pretend to be furious about charity. Works on men who love sport."
They went down a service stair that rejoined a corridor lined with framed photographs. Captains with cups. Teams with mouths wide in victory. In one, Oliver held silver above his head and looked so young that Daphne's chest hurt. Champagne arced behind him in a loop charm that never ended. The droplets fell over and over and never landed.
The corridor narrowed and turned. The air grew warmer and louder. Voices bounced off tile, some angry, some soothing. The smell of liniment and wet wood. A Healer passed them carrying a kit. He didn't glance up. The guard at the end of the tunnel looked at Pansy's pass and then her face and decided he didn't want to have whatever conversation would follow a no.
Daphne could hear him before she saw him. She'd always been able to. A certain roughness on a certain vowel. The scrape of a hand through hair when patience snapped. He wasn't shouting now. Worse. He was speaking very quietly through his teeth. The tone meant something was about to break.
She stopped one step inside the mouth of the tunnel. She could see the back room where the benches were. The door wasn't closed. Men moved like weather inside. Oliver stood with his hands on a table, head dropped for a moment, breath hard. The assistant coach spoke at his shoulder, looked like a man giving news that wouldn't be borne. Oliver straightened. The movement was stubborn rather than strong. He said something that ended with the word fine in a way that meant not fine at all. He picked up his jacket and put it down again. Picked up the whistle and put it down again. He didn't see her.
Pansy leaned close, voice low. "Do you want me to go in with you?"
"No," Daphne said.
Pansy nodded as if she'd expected that. She stepped back, not far, eyes on the entrance, body angled to block anyone who might start a conversation that would ruin this. "I'll be here," she said. "If you change your mind."
Daphne smoothed the edge of her sleeve, an old habit. It steadied her. She took one breath that felt like work and another that didn't. She stepped forward.
The rain hit the roof above the tunnel and made a sound like a thousand small decisions. The pitch lights hummed. The crowd roared as the teams came back out for the second half. The sound rolled down the concrete and curled around her ankles. She let it pass.
She crossed the last three metres to the threshold.
He still didn't look up.
She stood there anyway. Not a ghost at the edge of a room. Not a woman in a chair with a cold cup and the house holding its breath around her. A person. With eyes that had cried and dried. With a hand that had burned the paper that hurt and a mouth that could say what needed saying. Not now. Soon.
Behind her, Pansy's scarf caught the draft and fluttered like a signal. Daphne didn't turn.
"I'm going to see him," she'd said.
The thought held her steady as stone. The sound of the crowd rose and fell again. The tunnel smelled of liniment and rain and the metal tang of a charm that had burned too hot and too fast.
She took the last step and crossed the line.