Ginny's birthday was the eleventh.
He had been thinking about the gift since June, when he had watched her fly with Harry on the Nimbus for the first time — the way she flew, something visible to anyone paying attention and apparently invisible to everyone who wasn't. She had more talent in the air than Harry did technically. Harry was more dangerous, which was a different thing. But Ginny flew with the ease of someone the air simply agreed with, and she had been flying on borrowed equipment and other people's cast-offs her entire life, and he had decided in June that this was going to change.
He had owl-ordered from a specialist in Edinburgh, who sold performance brooms to private clients and had, when Ron described what he needed, suggested the Nimbus 2001 without hesitation. He had specified the colour personally: deep red, which was not a standard option and had cost a small supplement, and which was correct.
He brought it down to breakfast.
She saw the wrapped length of it propped against the kitchen table and went still in the specific way she went still when something was arriving that she hadn't let herself expect.
'Happy birthday,' he said.
She looked at him. Then at the broom. 'Ron.'
'I've seen you fly,' he said. 'You've been on borrowed equipment since you were six. That's long enough.'
She unwrapped it with the care of someone who already knew what it was and was giving the process the respect it deserved. The deep red of the handle in the morning kitchen light. She held it for a moment and said nothing, which was not like her.
Their mother was at the stove with her back to the table, doing something to the eggs that did not require her full attention, and her shoulders had the quality they had when she was feeling something she had decided not to perform.
Ginny looked up. Her eyes were slightly wet, which she was very clearly going to do something about. 'You saw me fly,' she said.
'You're extraordinary,' he said, simply. 'You should have the equipment that matches it.'
She hugged him, briefly and without ceremony, the way Ginny hugged people when she wasn't performing gratitude but meant it. Then she stepped back and looked at the broom again.
'The 2001,' she said. She had clearly noticed the tail configuration.
'Yes.'
'Not the 2000.'
'You'd have noticed the difference in the turns,' he said. 'I thought you should start with the right one.'
She looked at him with the expression she'd been developing all summer — the one that was still figuring out who this version of her brother was, and kept arriving at answers that required updating.
Harry came down twenty minutes later and saw the broom on the table and stopped.
'Whose is that?' he said.
'Mine,' Ginny said, with a quality in the word that was entirely new. Not performed. Factual. Mine.
Harry looked at it. At the colour. At Ginny's face. He looked at Ron.
'Happy birthday,' Ron said, to Ginny, before Harry could say anything.
'Happy birthday,' Harry said, a beat behind, and his voice had something in it that Ron noted and did not comment on.
They flew that afternoon, all three of them — Harry and Ron on their Firebolts, Ginny on her 2001. His mother watched from the garden for approximately four minutes before she went back inside, which was, for her, a significant act of trust.
He took one photograph from the ground: the two of them at altitude, Ginny pulling ahead into a turn that Harry was a beat behind on, the red broom catching the August light. He would know where it went in the album.
He put it in the summer section, before the feast. The photograph of the two of them flying, before the year that was coming. Proof, if it was needed, that there had been this first.