The rental was a two-storey terrace house, attached to the Grangers' on the right, which was either a remarkable coincidence or the direct result of Kevin spending forty-five minutes with Mr. Granger going through the street on Google Maps the previous evening.
Mr. Granger had not been difficult to convince. He'd looked at Kevin across the dinner table with the expression of a man doing a specific kind of arithmetic, and what the arithmetic had produced was: a twelve-year-old boy who turns down legal adoption because he has a different plan is not a child you argue with about property logistics. He'd called the letting agent himself.
The lease was in Mr. Granger's name. Kevin had paid the deposit in cash — Galleons to pounds, Gringotts to bank, clean and documented — and shaken hands and that had been that.
None of this was mentioned to Hermione.
She went to bed that night still slightly subdued, still turning over the adoption question without quite resolving it, her hand occasionally touching the pink bracelet on her wrist with the distracted, wondering quality of someone who isn't sure yet what something means.
Kevin packed his things quietly. Left the guest room exactly as he'd found it. Let himself out before six.
Mrs. Granger delivered the bad news at breakfast with what Kevin had specifically requested — a straight face and the full commitment of someone who understands that the joke only works if it lands.
"He's gone," Mr. Granger said, behind his newspaper, with the tone of a man who has been coached.
Hermione stared at him.
"He said he wasn't staying anymore."
"What?"
The newspaper did not lower.
Hermione's voice did the thing it did when she was genuinely frightened — the pitch it dropped to when performance was not available. She'd had a dream. Something about Kevin walking away and not looking back. She'd woken up from it three times in the night.
"Where did he go?"
"He just left," Mr. Granger said. "Said to turn right if you want to find him."
She didn't question it. She was out the front door in her slippers before the sentence had fully finished.
Kevin heard her coming from upstairs — the quick, specific sound of Hermione moving fast, which was different from the sound of most people moving fast in the particular way that a person's movement is always recognisably theirs.
He pushed the second-floor window open and leaned on the sill.
She came around the corner and stopped.
He looked down at her. She looked up at him.
For a moment she just stood there, and in that moment every layer of her was visible — the relief, the realisation, the anger arriving just behind it when the terror released, and underneath all of it something that had nothing to do with the prank at all, that had been sitting in her chest since the dream and before, and that was not quite ready to be named but was becoming impossible to ignore.
"Hey," Kevin said. "You all right?"
And that was when she started crying.
Not dramatically — Hermione didn't do dramatic. It was the quiet, sustained kind, the kind that happens when something has been held in very tightly for too long and the reason for holding it in has just been removed. She stood on the pavement in her slippers and cried, and Kevin was down from the window and beside her before she'd fully registered his feet hitting the ground.
He pulled her in. One arm around her, one hand on the back of her head.
"I'm sorry," he said. Quietly, directly, without qualification. "That was cruel. I shouldn't have done it that way."
She gripped the front of his jumper with both hands and said nothing, which was all right.
"I'm here," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."
After a while the crying eased. She stayed where she was.
"I had a dream," she said, muffled slightly by his jumper. "You walked away and you didn't look back. And I called your name but you just — " She stopped.
Kevin held her slightly tighter.
"And I knew it was a dream," she said. "But then you were actually gone and I just — I couldn't — "
"I know." He stroked her hair, slowly. "I know. I'm sorry."
She looked up at him eventually, eyes red, expression moving through the particular sequence of someone who is deciding to be honest rather than composed.
He cupped her face. Wiped the tears with his thumbs, carefully, the way you do something you want to do exactly right.
She bit his shoulder.
"Ow —"
Not gently. She bit him with the commitment of someone who has decided that this is the appropriate response to two days of suppressed anxiety and one genuinely terrible morning, and she was correct.
"Stupid Kevin," she said, pulling back, voice still thick. She hit his chest with one fist, not hard. "Stupid, stupid — "
"I know," he said. "You're right."
She hit him again. He let her.
He dropped to one knee — not dramatically, just to be at her level — and took her hand.
"How could I not want you?" he said, quietly enough that the words were just for her. "Hermione. I'm not leaving you. Ever."
She looked at him.
"Don't believe you," she said, which was not the same as I don't believe you.
"I know." He held her gaze. "That's all right. You don't have to right now."
He reached into his pocket. Slid the pink bracelet from the two on his wrist — the one he'd been wearing for both, waiting — and held it up.
She went still.
"My parents left these for me," he said. "The blue one was for me. The pink one — " He turned it slightly in the light. "Dad said to give it to someone important. The right person."
"Kevin — it's your parents' —"
"It's yours." He reached for her hand and slid it on. Careful. It resized itself, settling snug. "They'd have wanted that. I'm sure of it."
He pressed magic into his blue bracelet. Both lit up softly — the quiet glow finding each other, the beams touching where their hands were joined.
Hermione looked at the light for a long moment. Then at him.
She didn't say anything. She pulled him up from his knee, wrapped both arms around him, and pressed her face into his shoulder.
Upstairs in the Granger house, Mrs. Granger gripped her husband's arm and physically prevented him from opening the front door to go and stand on the doorstep.
"Let them have it," she whispered.
Mr. Granger made a sound of defeat.
Kevin showed her the house.
Empty rooms, bare floors, the particular smell of fresh paint and a building that was waiting to become something. He'd planned to furnish it over the next few weeks — he had a budget, a rough list, the outline of something functional.
Hermione walked through each room with the expression she wore when she was thinking very fast about something she wasn't saying yet. Then she turned to him at the top of the stairs.
"You turned down living with us because you wanted to be next door," she said.
"I wanted to be independent," Kevin said. "I don't want to owe your parents anything I can't repay. But — " he glanced toward the window, from which the Granger house was perfectly visible, "— I didn't want to be far."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"We're picking the furniture together," she said.
"I was hoping you'd say that."
She smiled — the full one, the one that was a long time coming. She took his hand and pulled him toward the stairs. "Come on. I have opinions about sofas."
He followed, laughing.
The next four days were the best of the summer.