At the beginning of the year, Allie was no one
Now she's infamous
**
Until her eleventh birthday, Allie didn't believe in magic. How could she when her mother had died when she was barely two and her father had never been around. Her life wasn't ver...
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The drive back up to the Lancashire cottage that I lived in with Sarah and Amy was a long one. It was only made to feel longer by the long stretches of uncomfortable silence. Sarah was still tense and Amy and I knew better than to keep badgering her. So the weird incident on the platform was to remain a mystery.
Sarah pulled up into the gravel driveway outside the cottage and got out of the car immediately. Amy shot me a confused look and slid out the car herself, slowly following her mother into the house. I took my time getting out of the car. I didn't particularly want to go inside where there would only be more uncomfortable silence. I had been looking forward to going back and spending Christmas with Sarah and Amy but now I was here I was missing Hogwarts. Maybe next year I would take Emmy up on her offer of Christmas shenanigans at the castle.
Despite what people might think, Christmas had never been a difficult time for me. I didn't remember my first two Christmases with my mum before she died so Christmas without her wasn't a particularly sad time. It was all I had ever known. Maybe it was because Sarah was being so evasive and Amy was being so uncharacteristically quiet that Christmas time didn't feel like it usually did. Maybe it was the fact that dementors had been forcing me to remember distant memories of my mother all year. Maybe it was a mixture of the two that I suddenly felt like something was missing and that something was my mother.
The cottage Sarah owned was in the middle of nowhere. And I mean that literally. It wasn't even in a remote village. It was literally on the side of a country road. It had been an old toll house back when people still had to pay tolls on almost every single road in England. The only other house for miles was an old hunting lodge. If I stood in the attic and peered out the Velux windows, I could just about make out the roof of that house. That was the house my mother owned. I had lived there with her for the first two years of my life. And now it was a distant memory.
It was a long walk between Sarah's cottage and the house my mother had owned. It was a long walk that we rarely tackled even on nice days, let alone the frosty winters day it was now. But something inside me told me I needed to go to that house.
Sarah came back out the car, still not looking herself, to get my trunk out of the car after I had taken too long to do so.
"I'm going to take a walk before unpacking," I said, getting straight to the point. Sarah stopped in the doorway and nodded.
"Okay," She said and set my trunk down in the hallway, "Don't stay out too long. You'll catch your death out there," she added like an afterthought and smiled weakly at me before I set off.
*
The house looked exactly as I remembered it. It wasn't hard, really. I didn't remember much about it but just looking at it brought back a few memories. I remembered taking a few wobbly steps on the gravel path leading up to the brightly painted red front door. The paint was peeling now and the gravel was thin underfoot. Weeds had sprouted up making the path blend in with the overgrown lawn.
