Unlike a Sister (Harmione)

Chapter 25: The Room by the Garden

Harry turned the key. The door stuck to its frame from disuse, but it gave way.

The Notting Hill townhome was between tenants now. It had once belonged to his grandmother's sister, Katherine, who bought the two-story house in the seventies when the area was still an artist enclave and not the gentrified purlieu it was today. Harry's mother had been Katherine's favorite niece and, when she died in 1997, she left the house to Lily's only child.

Harry once asked Aunt Petunia why she'd never mentioned Katherine before, but-as with many things with his aunt-the answer was frustratingly curt. When a Muggle solicitor showed an eighteen-year-old Harry around the property for the first time, however, Harry thought he understood. There were many pictures of a smiling Katherine with another woman, their arms casually wrapped around one another.

The home itself was lovely, though dated. Once Ginny made it clear she preferred to live in Whitechapel after graduation, Harry hired a Muggle broker to let out the place. The broker had told Harry he could double the rent if he updated the kitchen and installed something called an "in-unit washer-dryer," but Harry had never gotten around to it. Given the location, it was always easy to find tenants.

The exterior was dusted, red brick trimmed in pale green. There were two Juliet balconies on the second floor. Inside, the cream walls were startlingly blank against the warm wood floors. Turning into the sitting room with its large paned windows, however, Harry remembered his favorite part of the house: the walled-in garden that wrapped around the exterior of the sitting room.

The garden was dormant now in winter. The wisteria vines were like gnarled fingers clutching at the walls, desperate for spring. The hedgerow was a deep green, though, and rustled with life, small birds occasionally darting from its shelter to the birdbath in the centre of the garden. Along the back wall, between two bare bird cherry trees, was a wooden bench mottled with lichen. The broker had suggested removing it, but Harry had seen her name carved there next to someone named Elise. So, he hadn't.

Now Harry looked around the interior, hollow like the well of a ship. He went upstairs and found a beaten leather sofa in one of the bedrooms and a bedframe and mattress in the master. He levitated these carefully down the staircase to the sitting room, reckoning that if all the furniture were in one place, it'd look less spare.

He then went to his bag, retrieving soap and toilet roll for the washroom. He let the taps run for a while, clearing out the pipes. As he did so, he looked at himself in the mirror.

Perhaps it was because he'd so recently been in his own memories-when he was in his early twenties and at his physical prime-but he studied himself critically. He was still tall, of course, and his muscles were lithe and wiry, though less defined than in his youth, like a statue softened by rain. Yet, Harry had always felt there was a certain "underfed" look about him-in the prominence of his Adam's apple, in the pinched way some of his joints came together. He didn't like it and, in the mirror, he pushed his shoulders back to see whether it would mitigate the effect. It didn't really.

He looked at his face. He could see the early lines there, along his forehead and bracketing his mouth. The effect of too many nights spent at the office or in the field. He felt his skin was disconcertingly pale, the pallid countenance only broken by a thin, red welt beneath his fringe. And then there were his eyes-brilliant green with some darker hue beneath, like sediment at the bottom of a wine-bottle. This, at least, he liked. They were his mother's eyes.

He swallowed, lowering his fingers from the greying hairs near his temple. He was nervous. His palms felt cold. He went out to the kitchen and found an electric kettle in one of the cabinets. He conjured tea bags and two cups.

As he straightened the sheets on the bed for the fourth time, there was a quiet knock and Harry's heart shot into this throat.

He walked to the hall and opened the door.