She waited until Lily was not there.
That was the first thing Severus understood.
Not because Petunia said so. Because of where she stood and how still she held herself when he turned the corner by the chapel wall and saw her there alone, arms folded, school satchel hanging straight at one side, face arranged in the particular clean severity she wore when she believed advance preparation ought to count as moral advantage.
Lily would never have stood that way.
Lily occupied space as if the world were expected to make room. Petunia stood in it as if staking a claim.
Severus slowed.
The afternoon had gone grey early. Not with rain. With that low woollen sky late autumn managed better than any other season. The street smelled of damp brick and coal smoke and leaves gone dark in gutters. School had let out ten minutes before. Enough time for ordinary children to scatter into pairs and doorways and the row of houses waiting to take them back. Enough time, if one wanted to arrange an encounter, to choose a corner and stand at it until the right person appeared.
Petunia had chosen well.
The wall here narrowed the path. On one side the chapel stones held the cold. On the other, the row bent toward Spinner's End and the lane behind the houses. Not quite private. Not public enough to make raising one's voice attractive.
Severus stopped a few feet from her.
"Where's Lily?" he asked.
Petunia's expression altered almost imperceptibly, and he knew at once he had given her the exact opening she wanted.
"At home."
The answer was too quick to be casual.
He adjusted his satchel on his shoulder. The strap had begun fraying near the buckle, and he had wrapped thread around the weakest point two nights before. It scratched lightly under his fingers now. He looked at the fray rather than at Petunia's face.
"What do you want?"
Petunia drew herself a fraction straighter.
No preamble then. No pretence of accident. Good. That made the shape of things easier to see.
"You."
Severus looked up.
Petunia did not smile. She almost never smiled at him. Even her satisfactions had a grimness to them, as if pleasure required justification before she could permit herself its expression.
"I want a word," she said.
He said nothing.
The phrase was adult in her mouth, borrowed perhaps from her mother or from schoolmistresses or from the whole respectable world Petunia seemed to be practicing toward in advance. But the feeling beneath it was not adult at all. It was too immediate. Too sharply personal.
A bicycle rattled over bad pavement further down the row. Somewhere a dog barked twice and then remembered itself. The mills breathed under all of it, low and patient.
Petunia looked at him in one quick hard sweep. Clothes. Shoes. Collar. Face. Taking stock. He knew the motion. Tobias used versions of it when deciding what in the room had become offensive enough to name.
"You're always with her now," Petunia said.
There it was.
Not hello. Not you know my sister. Straight to grievance, because grievance had already been waiting too long to waste time on introductions.
Severus kept his face still.
"Sometimes," he said.
Petunia made a sound through her nose. "You say that about everything."
He did not answer.
The sky had gone a shade darker while they stood there. Or perhaps only the wall made it seem so. A leaf scraped along the path, caught against Petunia's shoe, and stayed.
"She'll get bored of you," Petunia said.
The sentence landed cleanly.
Not because he believed it at once. Because it had been lying in wait beneath many things already and she had only chosen to give it words.
He looked at the leaf by her shoe. Not at her.
Petunia mistook the silence for invitation and pressed on.
"She always does this."
Severus's gaze lifted then.
"What?"
"This." Petunia's hand moved once in a small angry gesture that seemed to indicate the whole absurd arrangement: streets, meetings, rivers, the field, him. "She finds something interesting and goes on and on with it, and then after a while she stops."
He should have said Lily was not a something. The sentence rose and died. Petunia would only hear in it mockery or correction, and either would feed her.
So he said, "I'm not doing anything."
Petunia laughed.
The sound was brief and harsh. Not amused. Offended by the very framing of the answer.
"That's exactly what you are."
The statement made no sense on its face. The statement made perfect sense beneath it. He knew that. Petunia knew he knew it.
She stepped closer by half a pace.
"Do you think she tells everyone all those things?"
"What things?"
"All the strange things." The words came out low and disdainful and frightened at the edges in a way Petunia likely did not hear herself. "The river and the flowers and your stupid leaves and all the rest of it."
Severus went still.
Lily had told her more than he had realized.
Or Petunia had listened better than Lily understood.
Petunia saw the stillness and mistook it, perhaps, for guilt or fear of discovery. Perhaps it was both.
"She doesn't tell Mum everything," Petunia said. "She thinks I don't know that. But I do."
Severus looked toward the lane.
It would be easy enough to leave. To step around her and go home. Petunia was smaller than the force of her own indignation made her seem. She could not stop him by standing there. Yet leaving now would concede something. Not to her words exactly. To the fact of her having arranged them and made him hear them in full.
So he remained.
Petunia's eyes narrowed.
"She talks to you like you're special."
The sentence might have sounded hopeful in another child. In Petunia it came edged with accusation.
Severus said, "No, she doesn't."
This was half-lie, half-defence. Lily spoke to him as if he mattered. That was not the same as special. It was also, perhaps, worse in Petunia's world.
"Yes, she does."
"No."
Petunia took one more step nearer. "You think I don't see?"
The question was absurd. Of course he knew she saw. Petunia had always seen. That had been the central problem from the start: Lily moved first and noticed consequence later, while Petunia noticed everything and then lived inside the noticing until it curdled.
He said nothing.
Petunia's voice dropped lower still, which made it harder to dismiss.
"She'll outgrow you."
The mills seemed louder for one second after that. Or perhaps all the nearer sounds had simply thinned away.
Severus looked at her properly then.
Petunia's face held triumph and hurt so close together they had become one expression. She believed what she was saying. Not because she understood Lily better than Lily understood herself. Because she needed to. Because in Petunia's view the world arranged itself into categories sooner or later, and whatever temporary aberration Lily was now entertaining must eventually correct itself.
"She won't keep..." Petunia stopped, searching for a word sharp enough. "This."
Severus waited.
Petunia found it.
"She won't keep dragging around some boy from Spinner's End when she knows better."
The line between his shoulders hardened.
He did not move. That, too, was habit. Some insults could only be survived by stillness at first. The body's instinct to lash or flinch had to be held down until the danger in the room, or on the street, declared what shape retaliation would take. By the time one reached that point, often no retaliation remained worth giving.
Petunia misread the stillness as vacancy.
"She'll have proper friends," she said.
Proper.
There it was. The word around which half of Petunia's soul seemed organized. Proper shoes. Proper houses. Proper questions. Proper girls who did not drag sisters through lanes and fields and riverbanks after children who knew too much about dangerous plants and not enough about speaking lightly.
Severus looked at the chapel wall behind her. At the damp line where moss had thickened in the shade. At anything except the exact center of what she had said.
Petunia continued, because once begun she could not seem to stop.
"She won't always want to hear about dead leaves and clouds and all your odd little things. She only does now because she hasn't worked out—" She caught herself there. Then finished anyway. "Because she doesn't always know what's embarrassing yet."
The word struck more cleanly than the others.
Not because it was crueler. Because it fit something he had feared inchoately already and had not wanted to hear spoken by someone else.
He knew his clothes. The house. The window once boarded. The kitchen smell. The books in their poor row. The bruise she had not believed. The fact that he stood apart from the other boys and from most of the world's ordinary arrangements. None of this was news. But Petunia gave the whole mass of it a single social name and pushed it across the pavement like a parcel returned to sender.
Embarrassing.
He felt the words begin to stay.
Petunia watched his face.
Some part of her, he thought dimly, had wanted him to argue. Or protest. Or deny. Something dramatic enough to justify her speaking at all. His silence made the whole encounter uglier because it left her standing in the full shape of what she had chosen to say.
"She will," Petunia insisted, more to the air now than to him. "Outgrow you."
Severus swallowed.
He could have told her Lily was not a dress or a pair of shoes to be outgrown alongside him. He could have said Petunia spoke as if her sister were a future already determined by Petunia's humiliations. He could have said any number of things that would have sounded clever afterward in memory and useless on the pavement itself.
Instead he said the only sentence that arrived with enough force to survive utterance.
"All right."
Petunia stared.
The answer wrong-footed her at once. Anger expects resistance. It has less practice with acceptance, especially when the acceptance is not sincere enough to concede but not loud enough to fight either.
"What?"
He looked at her. "All right."
Petunia flushed. "What does that mean?"
Severus shifted the satchel on his shoulder again. The frayed strap bit against his hand.
"It means you've said it."
Her mouth opened. Shut. Opened again.
The mills went on. A woman somewhere down the row called a child in for tea. The world, monstrously, had not paused for Petunia's speech.
"That isn't—" She stopped.
Whatever she had meant to say next required the cooperation of an argument, and he had not given her one. The whole scene sagged slightly under the weight of that refusal.
Petunia took a breath. "You think being quiet makes you clever."
"No."
"Then what?"
The answer came from somewhere older than the exchange itself.
"Nothing."
He had said the word a thousand times in his life. To Tobias. To teachers. To neighbours. To Lily. Usually as evasion. Usually as protection. This time it felt like a door closing.
Petunia saw it close.
Her face changed by a degree. The anger did not leave. It sharpened inward, becoming less theatrical and more personal.
"Fine," she said.
The word was not fine.
"Stay here forever then. Waiting."
For one second Severus thought she meant the street. The house. Spinner's End itself. Then he understood she meant Lily too. That he was, in her eyes, a boy who stood still while other people moved and one day would be left exactly where he had started, staring after them.
Petunia turned and walked away before he could answer if he had wanted to. Her back was very straight. One shoe clipped the pavement harder than the other where she still carried, faintly, the memory of the earlier fall. She did not look back.
Severus remained by the wall.
The whole encounter had taken only minutes. Less than some weather. Yet by the time Petunia vanished around the row, the afternoon had altered its pressure. The wall seemed colder at his back though he was not touching it. The sky lower. The path narrower than before.
"She'll outgrow you."
"Proper friends."
"Embarrassing."
The words arranged themselves in him with terrible efficiency, as if Petunia had not invented them but only found the ones already nearest the wound.
He told himself they were Petunia's words. Petunia's grievance. Petunia's need to drag the world back into the shape she wanted.
This was true.
It did not stop them staying.
He went home the long way.
Not because the long way was better. Because he did not want to cross the street and perhaps see Lily in the window and have Petunia's speech still so near the surface of his face.
The lane behind the chapel was empty. The field beyond had gone flat with late light. By the time he reached his gate, evening had begun its slow takeover of Spinner's End. Kitchen lights. Smoke. A radio somewhere too loud. The front step damp underfoot.
Inside, his mother was at the stove.
She looked up once when he came in. Then again, properly, when he did not set the satchel down at once.
"What?"
The same question as before. A different room.
Severus put the satchel on the chair. Took off his coat. Hung it carefully. The routine steadied the body if not the mind.
"Nothing."
His mother let the answer sit.
Then she said, without turning from the pot, "Did Lily say that?"
The accuracy of it made him look up sharply.
Eileen was stirring onions in the pan as though she had asked whether the grocer's had been out of bread again. Her tone carried no judgment. Only the inference of a woman who had seen enough patterns to know which weather belonged to whom.
He stared at the back of her head.
"No."
That made her pause.
Not long. The spoon continued. But there. Recognition of a different shape.
"Her sister then," she said.
He did not answer.
Again, the silence answered for him.
His mother set the spoon down and turned off the ring beneath the pan, though it had not yet needed it. Only then did she look at him fully.
"What did she say?"
The question arrived quietly enough that he knew he could refuse it and she would not force. That made the possibility of answering worse, somehow. He looked at the table. At the bread cloth. At the cup drying upside down by the sink. At the ordinary kitchen objects that had no useful words for this.
After a long moment he said, "That Lily will outgrow me."
His mother's face did not change much.
It changed enough.
"Did she."
The sentence was not a question. Not really. More a way of setting the words on the table to see what shape they made.
Severus said nothing.
Because what else was there to say? Petunia had said it. He had heard it. Now the sentence existed in the kitchen too.
Eileen looked at the stove. Then the window. Then him again.
At last she said, "Petunia wants a world where things stay in their places."
He frowned slightly.
"What does that mean?"
His mother picked the spoon up again and moved the onions once. "It means she notices when they don't."
The answer was not enough. It was also exactly enough.
Severus thought of Petunia's face by the wall. The clean anger. The need not merely to keep Lily but to keep Lily oriented toward the right kinds of people, places, futures. Toward the proper world and away from whatever untidy borderlands Lily crossed so naturally.
He said, before he could stop himself, "Maybe she's right."
The kitchen went very still.
Not dramatically. The onions still hissed faintly in the pan. A cup somewhere in the house settled with the old wood. Outside, a gate clattered. But inside the sentence, everything stilled.
His mother put the spoon down.
Then, quietly, "About which part?"
Severus looked at her.
He had not expected the question. Not because he thought she would comfort him. Because he had not expected her to separate the statement into parts and thereby insist, gently, on precision.
He looked at the table.
"The proper friends part," he said.
His mother was silent for a moment.
Then she said, "Proper according to whom?"
He almost laughed.
Not because it was funny. Because the answer was so obvious and so impossible to finish in one breath. Proper according to Petunia. Proper according to streets not like Spinner's End. Proper according to mothers who cleaned curtains weekly and fathers who leaned on doorframes as if homes were places built to hold bodies without incident. Proper according to whole classes of people Severus had only seen at library distances or through front room glass.
He did not answer.
Eileen did not press.
Instead she reached for the bread knife. Cut two slices. Set one on his plate and one on her own though she had not been about to eat yet. The act itself was answer enough in its way: the evening goes on. We remain here. Words do not cook supper.
After a while she said, "Lily's not a future."
He looked up.
His mother kept her eyes on the bread. "She's a girl."
The sentence was so plain it almost angered him.
Then its sense arrived.
Not a future. Not an inevitability. Not a category to be outgrown into or away from. Not a symbol on which Petunia might hang all her fears and Severus all his. A girl. Here now. Asking questions. Waiting at gates. Bringing bad cake. Listening by rivers. Capable of change, yes, but not in the simple, humiliating narrative Petunia had offered.
He looked at the table again.
That should have comforted him.
Instead it only made the whole thing more uncertain.
His mother did not say anything else.
Neither did he.
Later that night, he stood at his bedroom window and looked across the street.
The Evanses' upstairs room glowed faintly through the curtain gap. Two shadows crossed it at different speeds. One sharp-edged, one restless. Once the sharp-edged one stopped. The other moved on. Then both were gone.
Petunia's words remained.
Not because he believed them wholly. Because he could not dismiss them wholly either.
He went to bed with the sentence still somewhere near the center of him, not as truth exactly but as possibility, which in some cases was more corrosive.
For days afterward, whenever Lily ran toward him from the corner or called his name from the opposite pavement or asked him some impossible practical question about clouds, roots, or stones, Petunia's voice moved faintly beneath the moment like a second current under the river.
She'll outgrow you.
He never answered it aloud.
But the words stayed long after the corner had emptied and Petunia herself had gone home satisfied or not.
End of Chapter 26