August 1993
I met Hermione Granger properly on the thirtieth of August, though I’d have recognized her on sight even without an introduction — Harry had mentioned her enough times over the preceding weeks, always with the particular fondness of someone describing a friend he genuinely admired, that I’d built a fairly clear picture in my head before she ever set foot in my shop.
The picture, as it turned out, undersold her.
She came in trailing two parents who were doing their level best to look unbothered by the sheer improbability of the street outside — a well-dressed man and woman, clearly professionals, clearly intelligent, and clearly experiencing the specific vertigo of people who’d spent their whole lives understanding the world through one consistent set of rules only to discover, rather abruptly, that an entirely separate set had been operating quietly alongside it the whole time.
“You must be the shopkeeper Harry mentioned,” Hermione said, without preamble, already scanning my shelves with the brisk, thorough attention of someone conducting an inventory rather than browsing.
“He said you can explain difficult topics insuch a way its easier to understandand remember.
That’s rare.
Most people just expect you to memorize things without context.”
“I try to make a habit of it,” I said, charmed despite myself.
“You must be Hermione.”
“I am.
These are my parents, Richard and Helen Granger.” She said it with visible pride, the particular warmth of a girl who clearly adored her family and hadn’t yet learned to be embarrassed about showing it in public.
“They’re dentists.
Muggle dentists, I mean — obviously they’re Muggles, I just—”
“We got it, love,” her father said, amused, extending a hand to me.
“Richard.
This is Helen.
We’re still finding our feet with the whole—” he gestured broadly at the street outside, at the shop, at the general improbability of the last two years of his daughter’s life, “—all of this, if I’m honest.”
“Everyone finds their feet eventually,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Even the wizards who grew up in it get surprised sometimes.
Owl post still baffles half my customers.”
Helen laughed at that, some of the careful tension easing out of her shoulders, and I found myself liking both of them immediately — not overwhelmed into silence the way some Muggle parents apparently went, according to things I’d overheard around the Alley, but engaged, curious, asking sharp, sensible questions about how any of it actually worked rather than simply marveling at the spectacle of it.
“He said you sell reading glasses,” Hermione said, drawing my attention back with the brisk efficiency of someone who’d allowed exactly enough time for pleasantries before returning to the actual point.
“Ones that help you read faster.
Is that accurate, or is it Harry exaggerating?”
“Accurate, mostly.
They read your own natural pace and nudge it along a bit — noticeable difference over time, though it’s not magic in the sense of skipping the actual reading.” I retrieved a pair from the display and handed them across.
“Try them, if you like.”
She put them on, and I watched her expression do something I recognized instantly from a lifetime of knowing people exactly like her — a kind of hungry, focused delight, the particular joy of someone who’d never once in her life resented a book for being long, only resented not having enough hours to read all the ones she wanted to.
“I want them,” she said, immediately, none of Harry’s earlier hesitation in her at all.
“How much?”
I told her, and she paid without a flicker of concern, the transaction of someone whose family had clearly never made her feel guilty about wanting things — a small, quiet contrast to Harry’s careful arithmetic weeks before that I noted, privately, with real warmth for both of them in their very different ways.
“We’re never getting her attention back.”
“You never had it in the first place, dear,” Helen said, fondly, and Hermione rolled her eyes with the specific, well-worn patience of a girl who’d heard this particular joke many times before and loved her parents anyway.
It was as she was leaving, glasses already tucked carefully away, that I made a decision I’d been quietly turning over since Harry had first mentioned her — the way he’d described her workload, her ambition, the sheer number of subjects she was apparently determined to take despite the scheduling conflicts that should, by any reasonable measure, have made half of them impossible.
I’d gone to the ledger a few nights before, alone in my workshop, turning the question over carefully before I let myself pay for it.
Is there a student at Hogwarts this year planning to use a Time-Turner to attend more classes than her schedule should allow?
The price had been a few sickles — this kind of thing, apparently, wasn’t rare enough among ambitious students to count as a genuine secret, just a mildly guarded administrative matter — and the answer had confirmed exactly what I’d suspected.
What I’d paid more for, afterward, sitting with the weight of the decision for a long while before committing to it, was the follow-up: What happens to a person’s body and mind, over a full year, from sustained, heavy Time-Turner use — and how do they avoid the worst of it?
That price had been steeper but not overtly so.
Real medical knowledge, genuinely useful and genuinely uncommon even among Healers who specialized in unusual magical strain, the kind of thing that would have taken a curious researcher years to compile properly on their own.
I’d paid it without much hesitation in the end, because the alternative — watching a brilliant, driven girl push herself past a point nobody had warned her about, simply because the adults trusted with protecting her hadn’t thought to explain the risks properly — sat far worse with me than the cost ever could.
“Hermione,” I said, as she reached the door, and she turned back, eyebrow raised in polite curiosity.
“Before you go — can I give you something?
Not to open now.
Later, once you’ve actually got whatever tool you’re planning on using for your schedule this year.”
Something flickered across her face — quick, sharp, the look of someone realizing a stranger knew rather more than they should.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You don’t have to explain it to me,” I said gently, holding out a small sealed envelope I’d prepared that morning.
“I’m not going to ask, and I’m not going to tell anyone.
I just want you to have this before you actually start using it.
Open it once McGonagall’s given you whatever she’s giving you — not before.
It’s just some notes.
On pacing yourself.
Nothing dramatic, I promise.
Just things I think are worth knowing before you’re already deep into a difficult year and it’s harder to slow down and take the advice properly.”
She took the envelope carefully, studying it, studying me, with the same sharp, assessing focus she’d brought to my shelves minutes before.
“Why would you know anything about that?”
“I know a lot of odd, specific things,” I said, honestly, which was true even if it didn’t answer the actual question.
“Consider it a strange sort of good-luck gift from a shopkeeper who’d rather you finish this year well-rested than burnt out.
That’s all it is.
Also always remember you don’t have to take the class in hogwarts to sit the exam.
” Find the original chapter at g.com.
She looked at the envelope a moment longer, then tucked it carefully into her bag alongside her new glasses, some of the wariness easing into something more like careful trust.
“Thank you,” she said, quiet and genuine.
“I’ll open it when you said.”
“That’s all I ask.”
Her parents, who’d caught only the edges of the exchange, exchanged a brief, curious glance but didn’t press, the particular restraint of people still learning which questions in this new world were worth asking and which were better left alone.
Hermione said her goodbyes properly, promised to visit again before term if she had time, and left with her family trailing after her, the whole small procession disappearing back into the crowded, sun-warmed street.
The night of the thirty-first found me at the Burrow, invited — insisted upon, really, by Molly the moment she’d properly unpacked from Egypt, already declaring she was going to see her children off properly whether the rest of us had planned on it or not — along with a small, warm gathering that spilled out into the garden as the evening cooled: the Weasleys in their full, sun-browned, chaotic number, full of half-finished stories about pyramids and curse-breakers and one particularly memorable incident involving Percy and a scarab beetle that nobody would explain properly, Luna and Xenophilius wandered over from down the lane, and, a little later, Harry and Hermione, who’d only moved into the Burrow that same afternoon once the Weasleys were finally back to collect him, and who looked, in the golden evening light, more settled and more himself than I’d ever seen him.
“Big day tomorrow,” I said, finding him a little apart from the noise, sitting on an overturned bucket by the garden fence.
“Yeah.” He glanced toward me, easy in a way that would have seemed impossible the first time he’d hovered nervously by my shop door weeks before.
“Feels different this year.
Good different.” He turned his new glasses over in his hands, a small, unconscious habit he’d picked up.
“Thank you.
For all of it.
The essay help, and the Gringotts thing, and — just, letting me sit in your shop without wanting anything from me.”
“You don’t need to thank me for that,” I said, meaning it entirely.
“I liked having you there.
Still will, whenever you’re back for holidays.”
“I’ll write,” he said, a little shy about it, like the offer might not be welcome.
“If that’s alright.
Just to say how term’s going.”
“I’d like that a great deal.” I nodded toward the wand holster, fitted properly now to his forearm, the leather already showing the faint, comfortable wear of daily use.
“And bring me back a good story or two.
I imagine Hogwarts won’t disappoint.”
He laughed at that, easy and real, and for a moment we just sat together in the fading light, listening to the twins bickering somewhere behind us and Luna explaining something involving the stars to a patient, half-listening Ginny, and I thought that whatever strange, quiet second life I’d been handed in that grey nowhere months ago, this particular evening — full, warm, entirely unspectacular — was exactly the kind of thing I’d have asked for, if I’d known enough that first day to ask for it properly.
The next morning, I stood at the edge of the platform crowd at King’s Cross, having come along more to see them off properly than out of any real need, and watched a scarlet train swallow up an entire summer’s worth of small, hard-won victories — Harry with his new trunk and his fitted holster and a battered Runes book tucked carefully among his things, Hermione already deep in conversation with him about her packed schedule, glasses catching the morning light, the Weasley children pouring aboard in their usual cheerful chaos.
Harry caught my eye through the window as the train began to pull away, and lifted a hand in an easy, unhurried wave — not the wary, careful gesture of a boy testing whether an adult meant what they said, but the simple, confident wave of someone who’d already decided the answer was yes, and didn’t need to test it again.
I waved back, and stood on the platform a while longer after the train had gone, thinking about a shop with empty shelves not so very long ago, and a notebook full of other people’s small, unmet wishes, and a paper waiting quietly in a basement for January to finally arrive.
Summer was over.
Whatever came next, I decided, walking back out into the ordinary, bustling world of King’s Cross Station, I was ready to meet it exactly the same way I’d met everything so far.
Slowly.
Honestly.
One good conversation at a time.
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