who: @beckselwyn where: avery manor
She should have known better than to mention Beck to her mother. A brief comment over breakfast about an unfortunate encounter at St. Mungo’s had somehow spiraled into an invitation to dinner less than a week later. According to her mother, it was simply a chance to catch up. According to Sabrina, it was an ambush. A very polite, well-catered ambush.
The entire evening had been spent enduring increasingly transparent attempts to remind them of their shared history. Stories from Hogwarts, questions about work and travel, questions that somehow always seemed to end with her mother smiling into her wine glass as though she’d orchestrated something terribly clever.
By the time coffee appeared, the brunette had escaped. The balcony doors slid shut behind her, muting the sounds of conversation from inside. Cool evening air greeted her immediately, carrying the scent of the gardens below. She rested her hands against the stone railing and tilted her face toward the darkness, grateful for the silence after hours of being observed, or perhaps displayed.
The peace lasted all of thirty seconds as the sound of the door opening behind her drew a quiet sigh from her lips. “Please tell me you’ve come to inform me dinner is over.” The witch didn’t turn around immediately, a smile already threatening at the corners of her mouth. “Or that my mother has finally exhausted her supply of increasingly obvious questions about our personal lives.” Only then did she glance over her shoulder. “If not, I hope you’ve at least escaped with a fresh glass of wine. We deserve compensation for whatever that was.”
