By the time Lily knocked on the door, Severus had already decided he was not going to answer it.
This decision was made from the back room, with perfect seriousness, while standing on a chair and pretending to dust the mantel because his mother had said the room needed doing and because dusting was the sort of task one could stretch if one did it slowly enough. He heard the knock. He heard his mother pause in the kitchen. He heard the second knock, brighter than the first, as if the person outside assumed doors were things that would eventually agree with her if asked properly.
He kept his hand on the cloth and did not move.
Eileen appeared in the back room doorway with the tea towel still over one shoulder.
"Get down," she said.
He got down.
"There's a girl at the door."
"I know."
His mother looked at him.
That look meant several things at once: do not be difficult, I know you are about to be difficult, and I am too tired for the specific kind of difficulty you are preparing. Severus knew all three and disliked being understood in that way.
"She wants to say hello," Eileen said.
"I don't."
"No one asked whether you did."
From outside came a voice, muffled by door and hall but unmistakable even through wood.
"I know he's in there."
Severus felt his face go hot.
His mother's mouth changed very slightly. "Do you."
Not to him. To the absurdity of it, perhaps.
Then she moved to the front door.
Severus remained where he was for one second too long before following, because if he did not follow his mother would call him and if she called him the whole encounter would begin from a position of public unwillingness he could not recover from. Better to arrive under his own momentum, however reluctantly.
He stopped in the hall just beyond the front room threshold.
The door stood open. Cold afternoon light entered in a pale wedge, and in it stood Lily Evans with one hand on the gate and the other holding the edge of her cardigan shut where two buttons had been fastened wrong. Her hair looked darker outside than it had from the window, copper where the light found it and red-brown where it didn't. Beside her, on the pavement rather than the step, stood the older sister with arms folded and expression already spoiled by the whole business.
"My mum said I had to introduce myself properly," Lily said.
The sentence came out with enough honesty that Severus at once believed two things: that her mother had indeed told her to do this, and that she did not especially mind being told.
Eileen leaned on the door slightly. "That was civil of her."
Lily nodded. "She said it was rude not to."
The older sister let out a tiny sound of contempt at this, either for politeness generally or for being made to attend it.
Then Lily's eyes moved past Eileen and found Severus where he stood in the dim hall.
"There," she said, as if this solved something. "Hello."
Severus said nothing.
He knew he ought to. His mother's silence beside the open door carried that information quite clearly. But something in him refused the ease of it. Not because Lily had done anything wrong. Because she had not. Because she stood there in the cold light looking directly at him with none of the usual caution or mockery or sideways curiosity, and he had no proper use for such a thing.
Lily waited.
The older sister rolled her eyes. "Can we go now?"
"No," Lily said at once, still looking at Severus. Then, to him again, "I'm Lily."
"I know."
The answer came out more sharply than intended.
Lily did not seem offended. Only interested.
"My sister's Petunia," she added.
Petunia did not greet him. She only looked him over in one quick sweep from shoes to face and let the silence do the rest.
Severus knew that look. Not its exact source, perhaps, but its structure. Distaste first. Superiority second. A need to establish both before the room had fully formed around one. He had seen versions of it from boys at school, from women on the street, from Tobias on the wrong evenings. Petunia wore it more neatly than most.
Eileen stepped slightly back from the door. "Would you like to come in for a minute?"
Severus turned his head at once and looked at his mother.
She did not look back, but he knew she felt it.
Lily, however, brightened immediately. "All right."
Petunia said, "Lily."
Only her name, but full of warning.
"It'll only be a minute," Lily said.
And because apparently the world usually allowed her such declarations to become true, she stepped into the hall before anyone else had fully agreed.
Petunia remained on the path, offended enough to stay outside and curious enough not to go.
The front door closed behind Lily, leaving a thin seam of colder air around the frame. Up close, she looked smaller than she had across the street. Freckles over the bridge of her nose. Green eyes very awake. One sock slipping lower than the other. She took in the hall at once: the narrowness, the worn carpet, the banister polished by use more than care, the smell of damp wool and old paper that seemed to live permanently in the house no matter what was being cooked.
Most visitors would have gone awkward here.
Lily simply looked.
Not rudely. Thoroughly.
"This house is colder than ours," she said.
Petunia made a scandalized face from outside as though this were the worst possible opening line.
Eileen said, after only the faintest pause, "It is."
Severus wanted very badly for the floorboards to open.
Instead Lily turned to him with the satisfaction of someone who had successfully observed a fact. "I told Tuney your window really did break in the storm."
Severus stared at her.
Petunia spoke from the doorway without coming in. "I said it looked cracked before."
"It did not."
"It did so."
"It did not."
Their argument had the smoothness of old repetition. Severus watched the exchange and, absurdly, took some small comfort in the fact that they did not sound like his own house. Not because they were happy. Because their irritation did not carry danger in it.
Lily turned back to him. "Did it?"
"What?"
"Break in the storm."
He knew at once what to say. The lie had already been chosen last chapter and required only repetition to become habit.
"Yes."
Lily looked at him.
Not long. Not accusingly. Just directly enough that he felt the lie remain in the air between them rather than settling into the floorboards and disappearing as most lies in the house did.
"Mm," she said.
That sound contained disbelief so lightly worn it was almost politeness.
Petunia caught it and sharpened. "I told you."
"You don't know everything," Lily said.
"I know windows don't smash for nothing."
Severus's shoulders tightened before he could stop them.
Lily saw. Petunia, intent on being correct, did not.
Eileen said, "Storms do damage."
Petunia looked at the boarded pane visible through the kitchen doorway, then at the hall, then at Severus again. The look held less of her sister's open curiosity and more of something cautious, resistant, almost offended by the whole atmosphere of the place. Severus knew that too. Houses taught children what was ordinary. Sometimes ordinary met ordinary from elsewhere and both recoiled.
Lily, still unbothered, said to Severus, "Do you go out much?"
He blinked. "What?"
"Outside."
"I know what it means."
"Do you?"
Petunia made the same tiny sound as before, somewhere between disgust and triumph, as if Lily had at last managed to ask the impolite thing properly.
Severus looked at the door. Then at the floorboards. "Sometimes."
"You're always in the window."
Now it was his turn to stare.
Petunia laughed once, quietly and meanly. "I told you he was."
Lily ignored her. "Not always," she corrected herself. "Only lots."
There was no graceful answer available.
So Severus said the first one that could survive the sentence. "You're always outside."
Lily grinned at once.
"Yes."
The agreement startled him.
He had expected denial. Or offense. Or some correction. Instead she accepted the observation as one might accept weather.
Petunia said, "Because someone has to know where things are."
"That doesn't even mean anything," Lily told her.
"It means more than you think."
The sisters looked at each other.
Severus knew enough already to see that Petunia lived in a permanent state of being unconvinced by Lily's existence. Lily appeared to find this only intermittently troublesome.
Eileen shifted the towel on her shoulder. "What number are you now?"
Lily turned to her readily. "Nine."
"And your sister?"
"Twelve," Petunia said before Lily could answer for her, in the tone of someone reclaiming authority over at least her own age.
"Nine," Eileen repeated, and something in her voice changed. Not warmed exactly. Softened at the edges by a calculation Severus could not follow.
Lily looked back at him. "How old are you?"
"Nine."
"See?" she said at once, as if this proved some private theory.
Petunia said, "It proves he's nine."
Lily ignored that too.
The hall held a curious balance now. Eileen at the door, Lily in the middle of it, Petunia half-in and half-out, and Severus by the front room threshold wishing to disappear and yet not moving.
The front room curtain twitched.
Just once.
Mrs. Kirkby across the street, Severus thought immediately. Of course. Doors open on Spinner's End were public events. A new neighbour entering the Snape house for the first time would travel across the row by teatime without anyone needing to say they had seen it.
Lily followed his glance and turned, but by then the curtain was still again.
"What?" she asked.
"Nothing."
She gave him the same look as before. Not believing. Not pressing. It was an unnerving combination.
Eileen saved him. "You've introduced yourself properly."
Lily nodded. "Yes."
But she did not leave.
Instead she looked past Severus into the front room and said, "Do you read all those?"
Severus turned.
From where she stood, she could see the edge of the front room shelf and the books stacked there, plus the extra small pile on the table by the window where he had left them. To him, the books were the least remarkable part of the room. To her, apparently, they were not.
"Some," he said.
"That means yes," Petunia muttered.
Lily stepped past him before he could prevent it and peered into the front room with the frankness of someone who had not yet learned that certain rooms contained private weather.
Severus moved at once, not in front of her exactly but near enough to intercept if she touched anything.
She did not. She only looked.
"There are loads," she said.
"There aren't."
"There are compared to us."
Petunia, still in the hall, said, "That's because you don't put yours back."
"Do too."
"Do not."
Lily turned slightly and, in turning, caught sight of the little stack near the window where Botany and Common Medicinal Plants sat atop two smaller volumes.
"You read plant books?"
Severus stiffened.
"Sometimes."
"Why?"
The question was so direct it almost felt absurd. Why did one breathe. Why did one listen at doors. Why did one arrange books in rows straighter than necessary.
"Because they're books," he said.
Lily considered this with unexpected seriousness. "That's not an answer."
"It is."
"No, it isn't. It's like saying 'because they're there.'"
"That's also an answer."
She laughed.
There it was again. Quick, surprised, entirely unashamed of itself.
The sound moved through the dim front room and made the place look briefly ridiculous in its own gloom.
Petunia looked offended by the laugh. "Lily."
"What?"
"You can't just go into people's houses and argue with them."
"I'm not arguing."
"You are."
Severus said, without meaning to, "She is."
Lily looked at him at once and grinned. "See? He's talking more."
He regretted the sentence immediately.
Not because it was wrong. Because it had aligned him with her in the room, even for a second, against the sister. That sort of alignment carried consequences on Spinner's End and in houses generally. Still, the fact of it had happened.
Petunia drew herself up. "Mum said say hello, not stay forever."
Lily sighed. "We haven't stayed forever."
"Nearly."
This, too, seemed practiced.
Eileen, who had thus far allowed the whole visit to continue with more patience than Severus would have thought available in the house, finally said, "Your sister's right."
Petunia looked vindicated.
Lily looked only mildly disappointed.
"All right," she said. Then, to Severus, as if resuming a conversation meant to continue regardless of walls or time, "Do you know the way to the field behind the mill?"
He stared.
"The one with the long grass," she clarified. "I saw it from upstairs."
Severus said the first true thing that came. "You shouldn't go there."
"Why not?"
He glanced at Petunia, then at his mother, then back to Lily. "Because."
Lily tipped her head. "That's not an answer either."
"It's enough of one."
For the first time, something in her expression changed from amusement to attention. Real attention, not simply the bright surface kind she seemed to scatter over everyone. As though she had heard in the refusal not just secrecy but experience.
Petunia caught none of this. "Lily."
"All right," Lily said again. But her eyes remained on Severus. "Another day then."
The words were careless on the surface. Underneath them sat certainty.
Before he could decide how to answer, she moved back into the hall. Petunia stepped aside with a look that suggested this whole expedition had permanently lowered her view of civilisation. Eileen opened the door.
Cold entered again, along with the smell of damp pavement and chimney smoke.
Lily turned on the step and looked back once more into the house, at Severus standing by the front room threshold.
"Goodbye, Severus."
He had to answer that. Silence after a proper goodbye would become rudeness too visible to defend.
"Goodbye."
It came out flat. She took it as sufficient.
Petunia was already halfway down the path. Lily followed, but at the gate she looked back over her shoulder and said, with the same impossible ease as last time, "I still don't think it was the storm."
Then she was gone across the street, Petunia hissing something sharp beside her, both swallowed into the opposite doorway and the new life of that house.
Eileen shut the door.
The hall grew dim again at once.
For a moment neither she nor Severus moved.
Then his mother said, "You might have tried not to look as though being spoken to was a personal injury."
He stared at the floorboards.
"I did."
"No," she said. "You did not."
He said nothing.
A second later, to his annoyance, he heard the front room curtain across the street shift again.
Mrs. Kirkby would be dining on this for days.
Eileen adjusted the towel on her shoulder. "Well."
That was all. Yet the word held the end of an event, a small domestic punctuation.
Severus looked toward the opposite house through the dim front room glass. No red visible now. Only curtain, hall light, the suggestion of movement.
"She doesn't believe me," he said before he could stop himself.
His mother's eyes moved to him.
"About the window."
Eileen considered this a moment. "No."
The simplicity of the answer surprised him. "How do you know?"
"She looked at you."
That was answer enough.
He stood there with his hands at his sides and the front room seeming slightly altered around him. Not larger. Not brighter. Only more exposed, as if Lily's attention had entered and left something open behind it.
After a moment his mother went back to the kitchen.
Severus remained where he was.
On the table by the window lay the book Lily had noticed. The crack in the front room ceiling showed in the dull afternoon light. The shelf stood exactly as before. Yet the room did not feel as it had an hour earlier.
There was, now, someone across the street who had been inside this house and had seen it and had not recoiled properly. Someone who had called his lie a lie without accusation and asked questions as though questions were harmless things to carry into other people's rooms.
He was not sure whether this made her foolish or dangerous.
Perhaps both.
By evening the street had resumed its usual shape. Doors shut. Fires lit. Someone's radio too loud for half a song and then lowered. Tobias came home late enough and tired enough that the day folded itself around his return without breaking. Supper was eaten. Bowls washed. The boarded window darkened into a blank rectangle. Upstairs, the house settled by degrees.
But before bed Severus went to the window one last time.
Across the street, the Evanses' upstairs curtain had not been fully drawn. Through the gap he could see a slice of room and the edge of a bed. A head of red bent over something in her lap, perhaps a book, perhaps only hands kept busy because the day had not yet finished with her either.
He watched for only a moment.
Then he stepped back and let the curtain fall.
She had come because her parents had told her to.
That much was clear.
And yet the conversation that followed had not felt borrowed from adults at all. It had felt like something else entirely beginning in spite of everyone trying to behave properly around it.
End of Chapter 13