The cold had sharpened overnight.
By morning the street looked as if someone had taken a wet cloth to all its colour and found there had been almost none to begin with. The brick showed darker at the mortar. The pavement had silvered where thin puddles had frozen and then partly thawed. Chimney smoke rose straight for a little way before flattening under the weight of the sky.
Severus stood at the upstairs window and watched the street wake.
This had become part of mornings now. Not every morning. Not enough to name it habit even to himself. But often enough that his eyes went first to the opposite pavement before the kitchen, before the light under doors, before even the weather had fully arranged itself inside him.
Nothing moved yet outside the new house.
The curtain in the downstairs front room remained half-pinned back the way it had been since the van came. Their door was shut. No step on the path. No red at the edge of the frame.
Severus let the curtain fall.
The room behind him held its ordinary narrowness. Bed. Table. Shelf. The same two boards by the door that complained more than the others. His coat hung from the chair back. Inside its pocket, the library card waited where he had placed it last night, in its envelope, buttoned in for safety. The arithmetic book sat shut on the table. He had not opened it after supper.
He stood a moment longer by the window, not looking out now, only at the reflection of the pale room in the glass. Then he turned and went downstairs.
The kitchen was dim. The board over the broken pane turned the daylight into something mean before it reached the table. His mother stood at the stove with one hand on the kettle and her hair pinned back more neatly than usual, though one strand had already escaped by her ear. That generally meant she had been awake too long before he came down.
She glanced at him.
"You're up early."
He nodded.
The answer satisfied her enough.
There was tea. Toast, one slice each. The smell of coal beginning in the grate. The house felt ordinary in the thin careful way it sometimes did after a difficult evening, as though everyone in it had agreed to move around the memory without brushing against it.
Tobias had already left.
Severus knew this before his mother said it. His father's absence had its own shape. Less pressure in the air. Fewer objects left in the wrong place. A room reassembling itself after weather had passed through it.
He sat.
The toast was burnt along one edge. He ate it anyway.
Outside, the street began. A gate. A door. Somewhere further down, a bicycle wheel ticking over a bad patch in the pavement. The mill under all of it, low and steady as an old thought.
His mother poured tea and said, without looking at him, "The glazier's coming tomorrow."
He looked at the board. "Did Dad say?"
"No. Mr. Doran did. He shouted it over the wall when I was hanging washing."
"Will he fix it in one day?"
"If the pane fits."
That was all.
Severus wrapped both hands around the cup.
The question from yesterday remained in the house. Not in words now. In arrangement. In the way his mother did not look long at certain things. In the way he, too, avoided the places where silence had deepened. Some truths, once made visible, sat in rooms differently forever after.
He drank tea and looked at the table and did not ask anything more.
After breakfast his mother sent him upstairs to fetch the mending basket from her room. He did. Then to shake the rug in the yard. Then to bring in the coal scuttle before the next rain started. The sky had that look about it, low and undecided. The sort of day that would choose between damp and drizzle every hour.
The yard smelled of wet brick and old ash. He shook the rug, coughed at the dust, brought the coal in, and set the scuttle by the stove. From there he could see the top of the wall and, beyond it, the upper windows of the houses opposite.
One of them opened.
Not wide. Just enough to let out sound.
A girl's voice. Then another, older and sharper. Then silence.
Severus stood still with one hand on the scuttle handle.
He could not make out words. That did not matter. He knew at once whose voice must have been the first.
His mother called from inside, "Severus."
He took the scuttle in.
By noon the day had thinned into one of those pale afternoons that never quite became afternoon at all. His mother sent him to the grocer's for onions and dripping, exact change folded into his palm. He took his coat, checked automatically that the library card remained in its pocket, and stepped out into the street.
The cold sat lower now. Not on the face. In the fingertips. In the knees. A damp cold made of water not yet rain.
He went down the row with his head lowered against the air and his eyes doing what they always did: windows, corners, the alley by the butcher's, the place near the grocer's where the pavement dipped and held mud no one wanted. The street was mostly empty. A pram stood outside one door. Mrs. Kirkby's curtain moved once and settled.
At the grocer's, the onions were soft at one end and firm at the other. He chose the least bad three and accepted the dripping wrapped in yesterday's paper with a darkening patch already beginning through it. On the way back, the paper warmed his palm unpleasantly.
He reached his gate and stopped.
Across the street, on the opposite pavement, the red-haired girl stood with one foot on the kerb and one on the road's edge, trying to balance along the line of stone as if it had been laid there for that purpose. Her arms lifted slightly away from her sides each time she wobbled. She had no coat on, only a cardigan and a scarf hanging loose at her neck, its end dragging once in the wet and then not seeming to matter to her after.
For one second Severus thought only of retreat.
He could still go into the yard. The gate was in his hand. He could be inside before she turned. He could become one more movement among the ordinary ones of the street and be done with it.
Then she looked up and saw him.
The choice ended there.
She smiled at once.
Not the small smile through glass from before. A wider one now, immediate and unguarded, as if seeing him solved some tiny problem of the day.
"Hello," she called.
The word crossed the street and sat in the air between the houses as if it had every right to be there.
Severus remained at the gate.
No one called hello across Spinner's End without wanting something. Or mockery. Or witnesses. The sound of it felt almost indecent in its openness.
The girl stepped down from the kerb. "You live there."
It was not a question. It hardly needed to be. Still she said it as though making a discovery.
He nodded.
The dripping parcel had begun to leak into his fingers through the paper. He became absurdly aware of this and shifted it in his hand.
She crossed the road.
Not quickly. Not carelessly either, though still with more confidence than the street deserved. A cart would have had to slow for her, not because she forced it but because she did not seem to consider the possibility that the world would not.
She stopped just outside the line of his gate.
Up close, her hair looked darker at the roots and brighter where the thin daylight touched it. Not one red but many. Copper at one strand, rust at another, something almost gold where the light found the edges. Her face was freckled lightly across the nose. Her eyes were green. Not pale green. Proper green. The sort leaves had in books when they were drawn by someone who cared.
She looked at him directly.
"I'm Lily," she said.
The name did not fit Spinner's End any better than the colour of her hair did.
Severus kept one hand on the gate latch and the other around the grocer's parcel. "I know."
Her expression changed, not offended, only curious. "How?"
He could not say the whole street noticed you like a flare in fog. So he said, "The van."
"Oh." She considered this and then nodded as if it were entirely reasonable to know someone from the way they came into a place. "Yes. We made a lot of noise."
He said nothing.
The silence did not trouble her.
That was the next impossible thing.
Most children filled silence because they feared what it might say about them if left open. Others fled it. Lily only stood in it as if it were another kind of weather she happened not to mind.
At last she looked at the paper parcel in his hand. "What's that?"
"Dripping."
"What's dripping?"
He glanced down. "Dripping."
"The thing is?"
"Yes."
She frowned, not in disgust, only in concentration. "That's a terrible name."
He almost said it's also what it is. Instead he said nothing.
Lily smiled again, perhaps at his face, perhaps at the parcel, perhaps simply because she had not yet learned that strangers often needed reasons.
Behind him the kitchen window remained boarded, dull and black. Across the street, her own front door stood half-open, letting out a strip of hallway light though it was barely afternoon. Somewhere inside her house another girl's voice called, "Lily!"
Lily rolled her eyes in a motion so swift and candid it startled him.
"That's my sister," she said, as if this explained a permanent condition of the world. Then she looked back at him. "What's your name?"
He knew there was no help for it. Not now.
"Severus."
She repeated it at once, but not the way the older boy on the corner had. She tested the syllables as though they were an unfamiliar but interesting word in a book.
"Se-ver-us."
The name sounded strange in her mouth and not wrong.
"Well," she said brightly, "that's unusual."
He could not tell whether this was insult or approval.
When he gave no answer, she tipped her head. "Do you go to the same school as me?"
"I don't know where you go."
She seemed to think this delightful rather than obvious. "The one near the chapel. With the ugly fence."
He nodded.
"Then yes."
"Good," she said, as if he had complied with an arrangement.
The green of her scarf had gone dark where it touched wet pavement. One sock was rolled lower than the other. There was a chalk smudge on the side of one hand. None of it appeared to trouble her in the least.
Lily glanced past him at the house.
"What happened to your window?"
His body answered before his voice did.
Shoulders. Throat. A tightening all through the middle as if some invisible string had been pulled there.
"The storm," he said.
She looked up at the board over the pane. "It was a bad one."
"Yes."
Another voice from her house now, sharper. "Lily!"
"I'm coming!"
She called it back without taking her eyes off him, then lowered her voice slightly as if sharing something private already. "She keeps thinking I'll get lost."
"You might," he said before he could stop himself.
Lily laughed.
It was not loud. It was not pretty in the polished storybook way adults liked to pretend some girls' laughter was. It was quick and surprised and full-bodied, as if the sound had arrived faster than she could arrange it into anything daintier. It changed her whole face for the second it lasted.
Severus felt something in his chest go strangely unsteady.
He had heard laughter all his life, of course. At school. In the street. Through walls. Tobias's sour versions of it. Mrs. Kirkby once when someone's dog stole a chop from a cooling sill. But this was different for a reason he could not have named even if asked.
Perhaps because it was not at anyone.
Perhaps because nothing in it required protection from itself.
Lily looked at him with new interest now, as if he had unexpectedly proved to possess a shape she had not assumed. "You do talk."
He stared at the latch in his hand. "Sometimes."
"That's not very often."
"No."
Again the silence.
Again she stood in it without unease.
Then she smiled one last time, smaller now, as though deciding something. "All right then, Severus."
From inside her house came the older sister's voice yet again, carrying genuine annoyance this time.
Lily turned, walking backward two steps before facing properly toward her door. At the road's edge she looked back over her shoulder.
"See you."
Not goodbye. Not perhaps. Not if. The phrase arrived with the certainty of weather.
Then she ran across the street, scarf end flying behind her, and vanished through the open door just before the older sister appeared to scold her in the hall.
Severus remained by his gate.
The dripping parcel had nearly soaked through the paper into his palm. Cold air pressed at his ears. Somewhere down the row, a dog barked at nothing. The mills continued. The street remained the same street it had been all morning.
Yet it had altered.
He knew this with the same clean certainty with which he knew where the stairs creaked and how many matches remained in the box by the stove.
After a long moment he went into the yard and shut the gate behind him.
The kitchen smelled of onion and coal smoke and the stale damp of the board over the broken window. His mother turned from the stove as he entered.
"You took your time."
He set the onions and dripping on the table. "There was someone outside."
"Mm." She unwrapped the dripping and glanced at the paper's wet patch. "Who?"
"The girl."
His mother looked up.
"Across the street," he said.
"I know which girl you mean."
That surprised him enough to show on his face, because she added, dryly, "Some colours announce themselves."
He looked at the table.
"She spoke to you?"
"Yes."
"And did the sky fall?"
"No."
Eileen set the dripping aside and began peeling back the onion skins. "What did she want?"
He thought of the conversation. The name. The terrible name of dripping. The question about the window. The laugh.
"Nothing," he said.
His mother's hands paused on the onion.
Then she resumed. "Those are sometimes the people to watch most carefully."
He frowned slightly.
"Why?"
But Eileen had already moved on to the next onion and gave no answer.
Later, when the light had gone and the bulb made the kitchen yellow and small again, and Tobias had still not returned, and the new family's radio across the street hummed low through the wall, Severus stood once more at his bedroom window.
Their upstairs curtain was open a hand's width.
Through it he could see the vague shape of movement. Once, Lily crossed the room carrying a book and dropped onto the bed without the care most furniture on Spinner's End demanded. A moment later the older sister took the book from her and said something too sharp to be friendly. Lily pulled a face. Even in silhouette he could tell.
He let the curtain fall.
Then he stood in the dim room with his hand still on the cloth, thinking of a smile given for no reason except that he was there.
No demand in it. No pity. No mockery.
Only recognition.
It did not feel large while it was happening. Many things never did. They only became large afterward, when one found they had remained.
End of Chapter 12