If I May Be So Bold (A Harry Potter Universe Fanfiction)

6.

September 2, 2034

JAMES

As much as James loved having the girls home for the summer, he always thoroughly enjoyed that first weekend after the new term began, when he and Elise could spend a little time together, just the two of them for the first time in months.

On Saturday morning, they stayed in bed late, and then, once they'd had their caffeine for the morning, they went for a walk on the beach. It was still warm, a hint of crispness in the air, but not really fall temperatures yet.

Elise wore a white button down shirt loosely tucked into denim shorts, her hair in a low ponytail. She looked beautiful, but mostly it was because of the little smile on her face.

They walked for a while in silence until a couple of sandpipers flitted down into the sand a short ways ahead of them, poked their beaks into the sand then scurried back when a new wave rolled in. They stopped to watch them. Sandpipers were Ella's favorite. She had lost her mind over them as a little girl, squealing and giggling and running away from the waves alongside them. Birds never scattered around Ella. They seemed to know she was a friend.

The sandpipers would be gone soon, too, back to warmer climates.

"She talked to me," Elise said then, and that smile grew a tiny bit bigger. "Before you."

"Way to rub it in," James teased, but he wasn't serious. He knew how much it meant to Elise that Ella had sought her out for advice when it was usually always James. He loved both his girls so much, was so proud of each of them, but they were so different. Ella had a bond with him that Juni didn't seem to need. She was his little buddy, always had been.

Elise had been jealous of this for so long, had spent years trying to figure out why Ella always seemed to want James when she was sad or scared or nervous. For a long time, maybe even still, she had blamed herself. It had been difficult for her, at first, to adjust to being a mother. She had to work at her relationship with both girls, but with Ella especially, in a way James never had. He wasn't a perfect parent by any means, but communicating with them had always felt natural.

Maybe it was just because he'd had Piper to practice on first or maybe it was because he had experienced Elise's pregnancies — the first one and the one with Ella — much differently than she had, but he had felt connected to them from the moment they were born.

Elise had taken a long time to figure out how being a mum fit in with being everything else she was.

She'd gotten there, but the first year or two had been hard.

"I just feel like I have this window and I have to handle it right," Elise told him. "Like she's opening up and if I do it wrong, I'll lose her."

"You're not going to lose her, E," James said. He put his arm around her waist as they continued to walk. "She adores you."

"She's scared of me."

"She isn't," James said. "She just doesn't realize how much like you she really is. She doesn't see it, yet."

"I can't believe she's in fifth year," Elise said.

"I know." James' stomach clenched every time he thought about it. Fifteen years old. How had his baby been here for fifteen years already? Then he thought about Piper, twenty eight, engaged, managing a successful career. It was all impossible. They weren't supposed to grow up like that.

The good news was fifteen years of Ella made sixteen years straight of Elise and he sometimes couldn't even remember what it had been like not to know her.