I remember waking up the day after -- the hardness of the infirmary mattress, the way the sunlight came through the arching windows in distinct beams, the rough weave of the blanket pulled around my shoulders. The dust was dancing in that sunlight, and I thought, it’s so beautiful.

It had been so long since I’d had the ability to luxuriate in the little details of living in the world. Near the end, Tom had made my mind thick and heavy, a thing I could no longer grasp. Even before he took me into the chamber, he’d taken the world from me. I’d been living my days caged, wrapped in an impenetrable veil through which I could not reach, could not touch the living around me. My body fought me whenever I moved; my tongue was sluggish when I talked, or tried to. Eventually there was just a small, dying spark of me hidden somewhere in the recesses of my skull. The rest was Tom. I was Tom. I was gone.

And even when Harry swooped in and saved me, I was still sleep-deprived, will-deprived, life-deprived and barely there.

So waking up that morning wasn’t just waking up -- it was being born. I was new.

*

Later that morning, my parents left the grounds. Mum held me to her chest, so tightly that I thought I might suffocate, my face buried in her robes. She cried a bit, wiping her eyes and nose with a pale pink hanky she kept stuffed in a pocket. Dad just placed his hands on my shoulders and stared at me for a moment. A single tear made its way out, but he wiped it away immediately.

“I love you,” they kept saying. “I love you.”

*

I was running my fingers through my hair, getting ready to leave the infirmary. I was worried about looking presentable after a night spent in my robes. How peculiar, I thought, that I still cared. How wonderful.

And that’s when his blond head peeked through the door. In stepped Draco Malfoy. His robes were rumpled too, as though he had also slept in them. But, nonsense. Even if he had, he surely owned dozens of replacements, all fine and soft.

“What are you doing here, Malfoy?”

He just stared for a moment, and it reminded me oddly of the way my father had looked at me just a few minutes before.

“You’re supposed to be dead.”

If anyone else had been there, they may have assumed that Malfoy wished it were so. But something in his tone was breathy, and his eyes were so wide. He wasn’t expressing regret or anger. He was expressing pure, spotless amazement.

“I know, Malfoy. I know.”

With that, he seemed to snap out of his trance. He left quickly, and in silence.

*

I didn’t have to pretend to be well again. I felt so shocked, so lucky to still be around and to have access to my mind, my body, the world. I felt that I had risen from the dead, and while I did think about that death, it was only to compare this new goodness against it. My robes were hand-me-downs and not the latest style. That was better than death. The great hall looked up into the aching pinks and oranges of the evening sky, and I saw this while I ate my dinner. That was better than death. I got to eat dinner, tasting it once again after the time when my body fought me and was not mine. That was better than death. It was all so, so much better than death. I’d never known before.

*

On the train ride home, Harry wanted to know what Percy hadn’t wanted me to tell them. Giggling, I told them anyway. It delighted me to think that people could have such mundane things to worry about.

*

As I stepped off the Hogwarts Express, my parents waiting in the crowd, I tripped on the robe of a boy who cut in front of me. A blond boy, a boy in robes of satin. Draco Malfoy, making his way back to his father who stood silently and alone past the main crowd of impatient parents. Malfoy turned to see who’d stepped on his precious garment, and when he saw me, I expected him to say something nasty. Something typical. Something about how I was trying to touch a quality fabric for the first time in my life.

Instead, whispered:

“I’m sorry.”

*

I wondered. I wondered in bed, at the kitchen table, on a broom while playing Quidditch with my brothers. I wondered how many other people Tom Riddle had tricked. I had this way of leaving a partial smile on my face when I thought of these things, a mask to protect me from the prying eyes of my family. I wanted them to be naive, to assume I wasn’t thinking about Tom at all. I wanted them to be so supremely stupid as to believe I’d never think about him again.

He hadn’t been a bad companion, not at first. He was funny. He was sarcastic. Of course, I realized later that much of that was serious. Much of it was hatred cloaked in devices to make it seem more beautiful, more appropriate for idle chatter between friends. But when I spoke to my brothers and saw that they didn’t know what to say to me aside from commentary on the weather to try and draw me out -- when I spoke to my mother and felt the fear still swirling inside her, which she tried so hard to hide -- when I thought of every person I’d ever encountered without really knowing or being known back -- I valued what Tom had pretended to give. The fact that it was all pretend sometimes seemed an afterthought. The way things seem can be just as real as the way things are. And I had been friends with Tom Riddle. Briefly, and to disastrous results, I was a friend.

*

It was a windy day, and I left the Burrow to take a walk. I liked the cleansing, empty feeling of wind pushing and pulling me this way and that. The sky was gray, just clouds and clouds and clouds as far as I could see. My bare feet brushed at the dewy grass, and I delighted in aliveness of the sensation.

Draco. Draco Malfoy. What had he meant, being amazed at my life going on? What had he meant, being sorry?

I wandered down a path leading to the woods and entered the cover of trees. When I was a small child, I pretended to live in those woods -- that the leaves and branches were a roof, the trees partitions between rooms, the mossy ground beds and lush carpets. Now I pretended the same thing. I was safe in those woods, I was, I was. I could curl up in the roots of this tree, and I could cry just a little bit about the way my friend had betrayed me. I could cry and, even through the tears, feel happiness at having lived through it. The sadness and joy knotted together in my chest, made it hard to breathe.

When I felt clear and empty of emotion, I picked up a leaf, green and crisp and perfect, from the ground next to me. I twirled it in my fingers. The tears were still wet on my cheeks, but I was no longer crying. Within seconds, the breeze would dry the tears anyway.

My mind turned back to Malfoy. He’d seemed awful to me throughout my first year, what with his signature sneer and barbed words. More, his richness bothered me. Maybe even if he’d been nice, I would have disliked him for the sheer fact of his having so very much more than I did, and flaunting it.

I’d written to Tom about him. “What a horrible person,” I’d said, going on about some insult he’d thrown at my brother. Tom had replied that it wasn’t his cruelty that condemned him; it was his lack of style about it. “Not creative,” he’d said. I’d thought that assessment was funny and maybe even true. After all, Fred and George could be cruel, and yet they were always so clever about it, so clever that it stopped seeming like cruelty at all. I didn’t realize that Tom himself had created many novel cruelties.

Sitting in that woods, it seemed to me that maybe Malfoy’s lack of creativity was a mark in his favor. He didn’t bother to put enough effort into it to be surprising. Maybe that meant he wasn’t as evil as I’d thought before I knew what evil was.

*

I’ve always liked to listen in on things I’m not meant to hear. Growing up with so many brothers, it’s how I learned most things. Nobody wants to tell the baby, a girl, anything.

I was walking down the stairs quietly, the way I’d learned to do in order to go unnoticed. My brothers always barreled down them, stomping like a herd of hippogriffs.

Mum and Dad were sitting in the kitchen; I could hear their soft voices. I neared the bottom of the stairs but made sure to stay hidden.

“It just kills me that Malfoy was still out there,” my father said.

Malfoy? Draco?

“I know, Dear. I’d like nothing more than to hex his heart right out of his chest. But there’s nothing we can do about Lucius right now.”

I made sure to keep my breathing even and slow so they wouldn’t hear it. I wanted to know what Draco’s father had done.

“Contributing to the torture and near-murder of a child. He deserves Azkaban for life for giving her that diary.”

I’d heard enough I slipped back up the stairs, angry and confused. Of course nobody had told me such a pertinent fact about the cause of the biggest, worst event in my entire life. Nobody ever told me anything, trying to keep me an innocent little girl. It was too late for that. But maybe this was a piece of a puzzle. Maybe Draco had known what his father had done? Maybe that was why he was sorry.