8:10pm



Nadine traced spirals in the condensation water that dripped from their glasses to the table. Elf gin and tonic for her, cider pint for him. Neighbouring tables were empty, other drinkers clustered around a table playing dice. The bubble of conversation was friendly. A lingering smell of cooked chicken and gravy hung in the air, wafted very time the kitchen door opened. She had eaten dinner with Rex before she had ventured out into the cold. The temperature had gripped freezing point, and frost coated the cobbles of the Alley outside.

“I’m glad little Dee’s enjoying her first year.”
“Yes, but she needs to work harder.”

Orion nodded vaguely, a long tress of curly hair wrapped around his forefinger. He was looking past her, but now looked directly at her. His finger unravelled from the hair, allowing his hand to drop to the table before him. He was wearing his favourite leather jacket, a Mildred and the Mandrakes t-shirt underneath, with grey jeans and black leather boots.

“Have you considered a tutor?”

Nadine’s eyebrows lowered a fraction. She looked from his relaxed hand on the table to her ex-husband’s face, wearing an expression of mild irritation. Orion could only be suggesting that sarcastically. He had begrudgingly allowed Nadine to send Ariadne to schooling once they had divorced, only because Ariadne’s grandmother had run the lessons at Godric’s Hollow.

That was how they had met, all those years ago. Nadine’s family had brought her to Godric’s Hollow to study under the former unspeakable. To get a basic education ahead of attending Hogwarts. Orion’s mother had instructed magical children on how to form letters, basic runes, to ink their quills and perform basic arithmetic. They were the middle class and upper middle class, who couldn’t afford private tutors and didn’t want to send their children to Muggle primary schools. Those who might have once sent their children to the one-room primary at Godric’s Hollow before the schoolteacher had been gutted by a hippogriff.

“Well, as you might recall, your mother was tutoring her until this time last year.” Nadine drew a line through the spiral in the damp and sat straighter on her stool, folding her hands, one over the other on her bent knee.

“Yes…” Orion agreed, meeting her gaze despite her irritation. “That was what I wanted to ask you about, as it happened.” Nadine’s eyebrows drew a little further together. They had begun their drinks discussing Ariadne, as only natural. It was the only thing that truly tied the pair together. Even though she was now grown up and employed (though not gainfully, in Nadine’s opinion), they were forever her parents. Nadine had to make peace that Ariadne would always take after her father in some ways, rather than being perfection as Aoide was.

“It’s been a year now,” Orion continued, “near enough,” he didn’t break eye contact with Nadine. “They can’t still think she’s out there somewhere?” He asked, “not after the state of the cellar in the house.” The blackened walls had taken strong magic to solve, he understood. He’d had nothing to do with the restoration, having left as soon as he could. He had trusted Andromeda and Cepheus to do what was best. No point hanging around losing money while his family name was mud.

Nadine lifted her glass and took a sip, biding time as she considered her answer. Both she and Andromeda had been removed from all matters pertaining to the case, the moment Mortimer and Lyra were implicated. She had played the scene in Camden over and over in her mind after the event. The bloody, snarky teenagers. It was still an utter mystery to her what on earth the older Gamps had been up to. To have allowed the victims to escape in such a dramatic way had been baffling. The study or experiment as it had been called was even more disturbing. Enough detail of it had been released in the Prophet to give little Aoide nightmares.

“I would have thought Andromeda would have said to you?” Nadine countered. Of the pair of them, Andromeda had taken it harder. Nadine had done her best to be professional about it and distance herself from it all. But when it became clear her former sister-in-law really knew nothing of it, along with Cepheus and Orion, Nadine had allowed the Gamps back into her life, albeit at arm’s length.

“There’s been nothing, as far as I know, to suggest your mother’s still alive. But, neither dead. Your father’s not said, as far as I know. Everything leaks out eventually.” Everything. Aurors and Level Two might think themselves tight as ducks backsides, but someone always got gobby. A conversation a little too loud, or lacking charms, a chance exclamation at a connection to another investigation. Stuff leaked. “That’s why they went through the house.” Nadine explained, maintaining eye contact with her ex-husband. “You were too busy running off abroad to hear the detail. Has it taken you a year to man up to it?”

Nadine grasped her drink again and took a deeper swig. The ice rattled against the glass and she forced her emotions down. It was oh so easy to get irritated with Orion. She knew all his little weaknesses. His inability to be there when life got tough. He had probably left to find the nearest woman who would take him in his arms. But that wasn’t her problem now or her burden to carry.

“If she was dead,” Orion spoke after what had become a very uncomfortable silence, “she would be haunting us all now.” He swigged his drink, and appeared pleased as punch with his joke. “At least, haunting Andie for her taste in redecoration.”

“The only thing worse than your mother alive would be her ghost.” Nadine agreed, shuddering as if a goose had crossed her grave. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as if a cold draught had passed through the room. She instinctively glanced to the door of the pub, but nobody had stepped in or out of the entrance. The dice game continued uninterrupted. As she gazed away, Orion traced his finger through the pool of water between them, tracing shapes as she had before him. The candlelight picked out the water pooling on the table in rings from their drinks. The rune Perthro[1] faded from the grain, evaporating.

1.	Perthro – “Per-throw” – Literally: unknown – Esoteric: The Norns, Fate, Lot-Cup. Rune of fate and the unmanifest. Rune of probability and the role of luck in the evolutionary process of the all things. Universe at play.