Forced medical leave wasn’t suiting Norah well. Sure, she’d complained plenty of times about having no free time to do anything because of work, but this was maddening. Only a few days into the week he’d been ordered to take to make sure she was fully back to strength and she already wanted to scream. A purple shadow still lingered under one eye where she’d taken a few hits, and there was a hairline split on her knuckles where she’d dished a few out the muggle way. The silence in her apartment was deafening after the bustle of the school campus, or the weird and wonderful world of Hogsmeade, but the gym didn’t count as rest and recovery.
Reading a book at a coffee shop … normally she’d have laughed at herself, but at least this way she could unintentionally listen into conversations, and watch the world as it passed by the window. “Nope.” She grumbled to herself, folding a page as she stood up. If the author was going to go on yet another angsty man pain rant, she was going to need more coffee. Unfortunately she stood up straight into another person.
Trusting that nobody (except Scorpius, of course) had seen her face behind the mask, Emma wasn’t nervous about going out in public after the battle. There were enemies everywhere, after all, and she was going to have to get used to that. Especially once they were strong enough to wage war in the open without masks on. For now, though, Emma could talk to people days after having threatened them with death as though it were any other normal day. That was just part of blending in. Acting normally. “Anything good?” she asked casually.










