He went to the Grangers on the fifth of July.
He had written in advance — a letter sent the day after arriving at the Burrow, explaining that he wanted to come and talk to them about the current situation and what it meant for their family. He had been direct in the letter and had received back a direct reply: come Thursday, four o'clock, Daniel will be home from the practice.
He took the Knights bus to the street outside their house and knocked at the door at three fifty-nine.
Emma opened it. She had the quality she always had with him — the assessment that had settled into something more like recognition across the year, the look of someone who had been receiving reports from their daughter about a specific person for long enough that the direct encounter was simply the confirmation of what the reports had established.
'Ron,' she said.
'Mrs Granger,' he said. 'Thank you for having me.'
She looked at him for a moment. 'You're going to tell us something serious,' she said.
'Yes,' he said.
'Come in then,' she said.
He sat at the Granger kitchen table — the same table as the August dinner, the same quality of a house that had been thought about carefully by people who valued what they had put in it — and told them about the return of Voldemort with the directness he used for all serious conversations and the specific care he used for conversations with people who were entering a world they had not been born into and were encountering its dangers for the first time.
Daniel Granger listened with the quality he had brought to the investment conversations and the World Cup discussions — the focused attention of someone who received information seriously and asked the questions that followed from it seriously. Emma listened with the quality of a parent who was receiving information about her daughter's safety and was managing the response with considerable competence.
They asked good questions. He answered them fully.
'What do you need from us?' Daniel said, when the picture was complete.
'Three things,' Ron said. 'First, I want to ward this house. Basic protective charms — nothing that will alter how it looks or functions, but sufficient to make it significantly harder to locate and enter by magical means. I can do this today if you'll allow it.'
'Yes,' Emma said, without waiting for Daniel to respond, which Daniel received with the quality of a man who had been married long enough to know when his wife's decision was the decision.
'Second,' Ron said. 'I'd like Dobby — a house elf who is currently employed by Harry but works at Hogwarts — to be assigned to this house as an emergency contact. If either of you says my name or Harry's name in a context of clear distress, Dobby will come here and if necessary Apparate you both to the Wulfhall. The Wulfhall is my property and it's where my family will be based for the summer. It's warded and safe.'
'A house elf,' Daniel said.
'Small,' Ron said. 'Large ears. Completely reliable and very fast. He considers looking after Harry a personal obligation and will extend that to anyone Harry would want protected.'
Daniel absorbed this with the quality of a man encountering a category of being that was not in his existing framework and deciding to accept the framework rather than argue with it. 'Alright,' he said.
'Third,' Ron said. 'Hermione. I'd like her to come to the Wulfhall for the summer — with your permission and her own willingness, obviously. It's where most of the people she's closest to will be. There's work happening there that she'll want to be part of. She'll have her own room and complete privacy and I'll drive her home or have one of the adults side-apparate her to visit whenever she wants.'
A pause.
'She's already asked us,' Emma said. 'She asked us last week. She said you'd be asking.'
He looked at Emma. 'She said I'd be asking.'
'She said, and I quote: "Ron will ask you in exactly those words in exactly that order." ' Emma looked at him with the expression he had first seen across the kitchen table in August, the one that was both assessment and something warmer. 'She was correct.'
He thought about the green book and the first entry from September of second year: 'something has changed in him. I filed this under unexplained but confirmed.'
'She usually is,' he said.
He spent two hours warding the house. The Grangers watched from the kitchen while he worked through the rooms — not intrusively, simply present, in the way of people who had decided to trust someone with something that mattered and were watching the trust be spent carefully. When he was done he ran the diagnostic sequence and confirmed everything had settled cleanly into the walls.
'It's done,' he said. 'The wards will hold against standard detection and entry magic. They won't stop a determined assault by a large group, but they will make this house invisible to standard magical searches and significantly harder to breach for anyone below a fairly senior level.'
Daniel looked at the kitchen around him — the walls, the ceiling, the ordinary domesticity of a Thursday afternoon. 'I can't see anything different,' he said.
'That's correct,' Ron said. 'You won't be able to. It's there though.'
He set up the Dobby arrangement before he left — a brief, quiet conversation with Dobby, Dobby agreeing with the immediate enthusiasm of someone who had been looking for additional ways to be useful and had found one. He explained the activation condition to both Grangers: his name or Harry's name said aloud in clear distress.
'And if we just want to say your names normally,' Emma said, 'without summoning a house elf?'
'The intent component is part of the charm,' Ron said. 'Normal usage won't trigger it.'
She looked at him across the kitchen. 'You've thought about everything,' she said.
'I try to,' he said. 'I don't always succeed. But I try.'
She walked him to the door. On the step she said: 'She's happy, you know. Genuinely. The way she was as a small child before everything became about performance.' She paused. 'I thought you should know that.'
He held this for a moment. 'Thank you,' he said.
'Don't thank me,' she said. 'Just keep doing what you're doing.'
He took the Knight bus home.