Dinner was roast lamb and good conversation.
Emma Granger was interested in his previous-life cooking, which Hermione had apparently described in terms that had prompted her mother's curiosity. He answered what he could answer honestly — that he had cooked South Indian food as a much younger man, in different circumstances, and that the cookbook was something he was not yet ready to open but intended to.
Emma received this with the quality of someone who did not require the full picture to take an accurate measurement.
Daniel asked about the Healing practical arrangement with Madam Pomfrey, which Hermione had mentioned. He talked about that — the OWL and NEWT theory, the gaps in practical knowledge, the straightforward desire to be able to do something useful if a situation required it. He talked about it in the way he was comfortable talking about preparation: not as anxiety, but as method.
Daniel listened in the way he had at the World Cup and in the garden.
'Hermione mentioned you were ahead in your year,' he said. 'That's an understatement, isn't it.'
'It's accurate,' Ron said. 'In some subjects.'
'In most subjects,' Hermione said, from across the table, in the tone of someone correcting the record.
Ron looked at her. 'Not Astronomy,' he said.
'Astronomy,' she said, 'is a question of prioritisation, not ability, and you know that.'
Emma looked between them with the expression of someone watching a specific kind of dynamic operate in real time and finding it accurately described by what she'd been told.
'You argue like people who like each other,' she said.
'We are people who like each other,' Hermione said. 'It's not a coincidence.'
He helped clear the plates, which appeared to be unexpected — Emma reached for them at the same moment and they were briefly occupying the same space in the kitchen, and she looked at him with the quality she had brought to the whole evening.
'You'll do,' she said, quietly, with the tone of a final assessment delivered with precision rather than warmth and meaning both.
He brought the plates to the counter.
'Thank you for dinner,' he said. 'It was very good.'
'Yes,' she said. 'You're welcome.'