HOME

It takes years. The recovery. Loving someone for so long takes a while to come back from. Maddie understood--she lost her father when she was seventeen--it was as hard as Fred losing Anna. They grieved in their individual ways, shiny eyes, clasped hands, battles with doubt and insecurity. Nights when a bottle had to be pried from a hand. A whisper turned into a lullaby. And embrace lasted the night and well into the next day.

Anna was everything for Fred. His best friend. His girlfriend. His future wife. All of his love had been given to her. All of his dreams had been shared. It was a mystery when she broke off their engagement, returned the ring, and disappeared. When they found her body in Morocco, it was explained that she'd had cancer. The kind that made a person do weird, unexpected things. It made a person say hurtful words or react violently. She disappeared out of her love for Fred--because she didn't want him to remember her like that. He cried every day with the news, his heart torn in a billion pieces.

Maddie's father came before. She'd caught word of an encounter of an escaped criminal in the Ukraine but never knew that her quiet, sweet father would turn vigilante. The blast took them both out of the equation. Her sobs had filled Hogwarts for days. Nothing could keep her from falling apart. Except Fred--who understood that without him, she was lost. Who held her hand when they lowered her father in the ground. Who collected her homework as she lay lifelessly in his bed. Who brought her tea and dinner and quietly read to her until she fell asleep each night and gently woke her before the nightmares could hurt her.

When it was his turn to grieve, she was there at the funeral, her fingers tangled with his. When his grief turned to guilt, because he should have known sooner, she defended him. When he couldn't stand staying with his parents anymore, she offered him her bed in her tiny apartment. She took off weeks at her job to comfort him. She spent all of her time making certain that he would survive the terribly tragedy.

They were glue. Piece by piece, they reattached their broken pieces; not able to repair what was lost, but able to reconstruct.

It took five years before Fred ever realized that Maddie could ever be more than his friend. After her grandmother died, he realized how integrated into her family he was--how all of her relatives knew him. How he was practically a member of what little she'd shared with him. This death was easier, more of a relief, but the routine was familiar. The crying, the nightmares, the whimpered apologies, the nights of baking to avoid sleep, the sleeplessness that came with work, the time spent away from the apartment.

With Maddie's grandmother gone, her mother left the London built business in favor of Paris. The shop was boarded up, abandoned; which was how she felt when she walked down Diagon, remembering the feelings she'd mustered the first time she'd seen it open and the moment that it had been closed. Each nail had felt like a nail in her own coffin.

Things changed between them. There was distance. A distemper that weaseled, slowly, into their relationship until she couldn't take it anymore. She moved out of the apartment, back into her own home, digging through the memories until nothing remained.

Fred threw himself into his work. He blamed himself for the broken ties and each day was like hell without her. No one to comfort him in the night when he dreamed of her. No one to share the joys and the difficulties that came with working with wands. No one to confide in.

It took six months for them to call each other, trying to give ample distance, until she breaks down and dials his number. It rings so many times she thinks he'll never pick up, but his quiet voice on the other end of the line is enough to make her quiver with anxiety. Finally, she hears him sigh.

"Maddie, won't you please just come home?"