He got back to the Burrow at half past six.
His mother was in the kitchen doorway before he cleared the gate. She looked at him, and then at the two sets of keys he set on the kitchen table, and the expression became something else entirely.
His father came in from the garden with his boots still on — which his mother noticed and did not address in the current moment, which indicated the level of her interest in what was on the table.
Arthur Weasley picked up the Jaguar key. He turned it over. He looked at the badge on the fob with the expression he gave objects entirely outside his ordinary frame of reference that were, therefore, extraordinarily interesting.
'Ron,' he said.
'For when Black's opens,' Ron said. 'Sirius has the space. The club is for later. But this one's for now — for the shed, for the work.' He paused. 'It needs someone who'll appreciate it.'
His father held the key with both hands the way he held the things he loved best. He looked at the badge. Then at Ron. The expression was the one he had for things he had not expected to have.
'What kind?' he said.
'Jaguar XJ6. 1990. The previous owner kept it properly.'
His father set the key down and picked it up again.
His mother was watching both of them with her arms folded, her expression doing several things at once. She looked at the second key.
'And the other?' she said.
'Mine,' he said. 'A Porsche. For the same reasons.'
She looked at him with the expression that was not quite criticism and not quite approval and was entirely her.
'Ron,' she said.
'I know,' he said.
She looked at the two keys on the kitchen table, and at her son who was fourteen years old and had spent the day buying cars in Muggle London using an aging potion and was entirely calm about it, and she picked up her wooden spoon and went back to the stove.
'Dinner in ten minutes,' she said. 'Wash your hands.'
He went.
He had left the parcel on the kitchen table that night after everyone else had gone to sleep. No note. She found it when she came in from checking the garden, still in her apron, and stood looking at it for a moment before she picked it up.
She unwrapped it without hurrying. The amber caught the morning light through the window and held it --- that particular warm gold, the colour of a kitchen in the afternoon when everything in it is known and accounted for. She looked at it for a long time. Then she looked at him, with the expression she had in the March photograph, and did not say anything, which was, for his mother, the precise equivalent of saying everything.
She put it on.
She wore it to breakfast, and to the shopping, and Ron saw it again at dinner against her collar, the amber still catching light, and said nothing about it, which was the correct response, and which she received in the way she received things that were given in the right spirit: without making them more than they were, or less.