I hand Tilly the last tissue of the box at the same time I’m standing up and putting the cards away. Some might call it multitasking, I call it “telling my client they must leave”. She dries her tears and murmurs how sorry she is that this took up so much of my time. ‘Nonsense, don’t worry about it’, I murmur back like the complete loser I am, because no amount of work has ever made me move on from my people-pleaser tendencies. She did, in fact, take up a lot of my time, more than what the usual session costs; I should have been ready to go by now.

I open the door to the studio and cough loudly and a little bit more than necessary, but it is a precaution I take every time I have a client leaving and Remus is around. The last thing I need is for one of them to see him using his wand. They might believe in what my cards can tell them about their love lives or job opportunities and new horizons, but I don’t want to have my clients obliviated. 

Discreetly, I look around the flat only to catch Remus putting away the groceries he must’ve got on his way home using his hands, thank God. He looks up wearing a comfortable smile on his face and waves at us. Before Tilly can even utter a word, I take her arm and lead her to the door, charging her more than what I usually do. Without complaining, she slides the bills on my hand.

“Is that your…?” Tilly starts to ask before I interrupt her by opening the door and smiling a little bit too much to be genuine.

“Goodbye, Tilly. See you next time!” I shut the door before she could even realise she’s out of the flat.

Making my way into the kitchen, I jump onto the counter, swinging my legs while I grab a biscuit from one of the jars. Remus is finishing with the groceries, but he’s now using his wand. I admire the fridge opening at the same time some dairies jump from the brown bag and float around the kitchen until they are neatly stored inside the fridge. Next, the lid of the cookie jar by my side starts hovering over it while more cookies enter and fill it; the crumbling of the paper is heard for a second and then it falls into the bin. I look back towards Remus, but instead there is a bag of the sweetest candy floating in front of my face, which immediately lights up. My hands try to grab it, but I’m a second too late and the bag is already flying away from me.

“You know, that’s not a nice thing to do to your non-magical girlfriend, you bastard.”

“Well, what you did to your client is also not a nice thing to do.” Ugh, the nerve. “Also, you’re not non-magical.”

“Am I not, in your world’s term, a simple muggle?”

“Yeah, well, my world can be magical but not updated on muggles. You’re not, not in the least, simple.” The final groceries are put away as Remus approaches me, settling one of his hands on my thigh, climbing till it finally rests on my waist, and the other on my cheek, tilting my head upwards so he can see my face. “That’s not what I was saying, though. You,” stressing and stretching the last sound, “are going to be clientless one day if you keep slamming the door on their faces.”

There’s an unimpressed look on my face, probably from just trying to let him talk and not attack his lips after not seeing him for the entirety of the afternoon. I like the way his voice sounds. It makes it harder to concentrate.

“That look would get you into Slytherin in a second.”

“Your magical world should upgrade in all senses, then. Cannot believe they sort you into houses and there’s a whole rivalry round that. Fuckin’ cliché.” He laughs. Next thing I know, the sight of him drawing his lower lip between his teeth makes me dizzy. I hook my arms round his neck, playing with a few strands of his hair while I sit straight and get closer to his face.

“Missed you,” I whisper.

Remus furrows his eyebrows, incredulous look on his eyes and a teasing smile appearing on his face. “Since when do you say ‘missed you’?”

“Since I’ve just spent the whole afternoon listening to a girl that reminded me too much of myself in my twenties. I hated seeing everyone from my friend group with a girlfriend or getting married to the boy they’ve been with since high school while I was alone or getting ghosted by asshats.” 

“I wasn’t much of a dating guy during my Hogwarts years either,” Remus shrugs his shoulders.

“Still, you were learning fricking magic, flying round in your brooms, making love potions. That has to count for something!” My hands stop playing with his hair to rest into their designated place, his back. From under his festive red and green sweater, I draw circles with the tips of my fingers. “Meanwhile, I was learning Tarot and had a spirit or- or something knock over my books every night.”

“A spirit?”

“Yeah, did I never tell you? Had to call the Supreme Sorceresses to get rid of it.”

“Let me guess, your mum and your aunt?”

“Who else?” 

He laughs again, and Remus is sure he will not get tired of his own laugh; not that it is related to his ego or something, but he loves knowing his laughs are a result of her presence. What else is he supposed to do around her other than laugh? She’s joyful and full of mirth, moving through life with a wicked pack of cards and no wand, creating and leaving magic everywhere she goes in her own way. He knew he would follow her to whatever her mind or those cards would take her. 

It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for my boyfriend to have to go away for work. He frequently claimed he had to travel, and sometimes that meant he was away for weeks at a time. Of course, I missed him like crazy, especially when the only form of communication we had was through letters, apparently Oliver didn’t have a phone where he was.

It would have made it a lot easier, however, if I’d known what he did for work. 

Oliver and I had been together five years, since we were nineteen, and we’d been living together for the past year, and in that entire time I still had no idea what exactly he did for a living. We got money from him, a reasonable amount, if not a little on the high side, but he’d never told me, and no matter how many times I asked, he never gave in.

He had been home for about a week when we got the letter in the mail, and I realised I’d never lived with him when we had to fill out the census. Of course, Oliver was a bit of a man-child, which I usually found endearing, but sometimes, when he didn’t know how the washing machine worked, it was a little irritating.

“Hey, Ollie,” I was sitting at the kitchen table filling out the form, when it came to the part when it came to the part I had to fill in which area of work he did. “I know you don’t want to tell me, but I need to know, what exactly do you do? For the census,”

Oliver was watching the news on the couch, and he looked up at me and sighed. “Okay, we’ve been together long enough, you deserve to know,”

“What, are you, like, a hitman?” I joked, but Oliver sat down seriously. “Wait, you’re not a hitman are you?”

“No, of course not,” he assured me, taking my hand. Oliver was very serious when it came to a lot of things, but when he was with me he was a little more lighthearted. “There’s something really big about my life that I haven’t told you, and you deserve to know. I totally understand if you’re mad, but it’s not something I can tell every girlfriend I have, you know? I had to make sure you were here to stay,”

“Oliver,” I said uncertainly. “What’s this big secret?”

After realising I knew nothing about his job, I started thinking about how else I didn’t know about many other aspects of his life. I knew he’d gone to boarding school, and he was the captain of some sort of sports team, although he’d never told me which one. 

He assured me once more than he’d tell me, before taking a moment to gather his thoughts. He then laid out his entire childhood for me, including telling me all about the Wizarding World. At first I hadn’t believed him, I mean, who would? It was only when he cast a spell in front of me that I had realised he may have been telling the truth.

He told me all about what he did for work (which honestly didn’t help me in filling out the census form) and how he’d been the captain of his quidditch team at his boarding school. He told me all about his teammates, and how he didn’t have many non-quidditch friends, as he spent a long time focusing on the sport. He told me about the war, and how after it was over he needed a break from magic, and it was then that he’d decided to take a chance on the cute muggle (I was offended at first, before he assured me it just meant a non-magic person) girl- me- that he’d met at the grocery store.

I’d always been a rationally thinking person, I was a journalist, after all. It was my job to find the truth, and I’d found it.

“Love?” he asked me, concerned. After his whole spiel, I’d taken to looking down at the table, my hands fiddling with his fingers, something I’d always done to calm myself. “I understand if this is too much,”

“No,” I said softly, raising my head to make eye contact with the man I loved so much. “It’s not too much. It’s just a lot, not too much, though,”

“I love you more than anything,” he was letting his accent thicken, knowing it softened me.

“I love you too, Oliver,” I rolled my eyes. “Thank you for trusting me, I can understand it would have definitely been hard on you,”

“It’s not something you can really say on the first date,” he laughed weakly. “I just… I needed to make sure you were serious, because no one can know. And I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time, I was just scared,” Oliver admitted. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” I assured him.

I remained true to my word, and I didn’t go anywhere, and over the next four years, we got married. I’d met his parents, they had no qualms about the fact I wasn’t magical, and welcomed me into their family with open arms. Fortunately, my job was one that they had in the wizarding world, so I had no need to explain it to them. However, journalists were a lot less respected nowadays apparently, due to the lack of truthful journalism that was published during the war. 

It was about a year after we were married, Oliver brought up the subject of having children. It was something we’d talked about before, but I was a little more hesitant now that I knew there was a 99% chance that I’d give birth to a magical child. Oliver had known that I felt better about situations I knew about, so he’d bought me as many magical books as he could get his hands on, bar the ones teaching magic, as he felt I’d have no real use for them.

However, that didn’t stop me from wanting children, so eventually I repented, finding myself pregnant a few months after my twenty-ninth birthday.

It was a lot different than I’d thought, magical children providing a lot more chaos than I’d been anticipating, and I had a lot of experience with little children, having had a job as a nanny while I went through college. But I loved my boys more than anything, having three of them in total, including my doting husband.

“Darling,” he’d said to me while we were preparing for bed one night, having just put the children to bed. “I don’t see why you won’t have one or two more,”

“How many, exactly, were you wanting?” I rose an eyebrow.

“Seven?” he asked sheepishly.

“And is this because you are trying to form your own quidditch team with your children?”

“Well, my love, I just think you deserve a nice big happy family and I think kids deserve you as a mum, with your gorgeous smile, and your loving disposition,” Oliver said,

“One more,” I said, “That’s it,”

We ended up having twins, so we had two. A girl, and another boy. I swore to him that four was my maximum, and I suppose this time he could tell I was serious this time, so he didn’t ask for any more. 

I loved Oliver more than I thought possible, but seeing him with our children made me somehow love him even more. We sent them to primary school with other muggle kids, I was adamant that they receive a normal education after he told me the only school he ever went to was Hogwarts. They knew about magic, of course, only after they were old enough to understand the importance of secrecy. Zackary was by far the most excited. We told him a few months before Connor was due to start Hogwarts, and he seemed quite miffed that I didn’t possess magical genes, only his dad did, still, he was very excited.

Dropping the youngest of my children at the train station was very bittersweet. I couldn’t get onto the platform, so we had to say our goodbyes outside the barrier. I hugged Connor first, my fourteen year old son squirming to get away from me “Mum!”

“Well excuse me,” I said, “I guess I won’t send you any money while you’re at school, since apparently you don’t need me,”

Connor rolled his eyes, kissing my cheek. Next was Luke, who wasn’t too old to show his mother affection, giving me a big hug.

Then came the twins who were, by far, the most nervous. “You guys okay?” I asked them. Natalie nodded somewhat nervously, always the more adventurous of the two. Zackary bit his lip, looking at his shoes.

“Hey, kiddo,” Oliver knelt down beside me to look our youngest in the eye. “It’ll be okay, Hogwarts is amazing, and you’ve got your big sister there with you, and Connor and Luke, they’ll take care of you,”

“What if people don’t like me?” Zack asked quietly.

I knew nothing about Hogwarts, so I couldn’t offer much insight. Oliver knew exactly what to do though, whispering to him, “You see that guy who just walked in? The one with the two kids?” Zack nodded. “I used to share a room with him. He was the most annoying person I’ve ever met, and he had a group of friends, and even a girlfriend,”

Zack wrinkled his nose. “Ew,”

“I forgot I was talking to an eleven year old,” Oliver rolled his eyes. “But trust me, Hogwarts is a place where you’ll find the people you’re supposed to be with,”

Zack seemed a little more confident, but still, he asked. “What if I’m not in Gryffindor?” Oliver was, and our two older sons were as well. 

“Well, your mum wasn’t in Gryffindor,” Oliver said cheekily as I rolled my eyes. “And I love her, so no matter what house you’re in, you’ll be fine,”

The station clock showed 10:50, so I hurried them along. “Bye, Mum,”

“Bye,” I hugged each of them once in turn before their father took them through the barrier, and I stood there and waited. I hated not being able to truly send my children off to school. My husband came and stood beside me. “I miss them,”

“I know,” Oliver kissed the top of my head. “They’ll be home for Christmas, though. Unless they decide to stay,”