Augusta Longbottom found him near the door as the evening was drawing in.
She had the quality she had carried all evening — upright, formal, not performing warmth but not withholding it either. Up close she had the bearing of someone who had been through a great deal and had come through it with her standards intact, which was its own kind of strength.
'The Gillyweed,' she said. Not as a question.
'Yes,' he said.
'Hebridean stock,' she said. 'Neville told me. That is not easily sourced.'
'No,' he said. 'It takes some planning.'
She looked at him with the assessing quality she had used at the beginning of the evening, and which she had not put down. 'You think Herbology is serious,' she said.
'I think Neville's Herbology is serious,' he said. 'Which is not the same thing as thinking all Herbology is serious. Neville has a quality in that subject that I've seen matched by very few people in any subject.'
Augusta Longbottom was quiet for a moment. It was not a silence of disagreement. It was the silence of someone holding a thing carefully.
'He has always been better than he believed himself to be,' she said, with a quality that was not an apology and not quite not one. 'I have not always made that easy for him to see.'
This was not what he had expected. He received it without comment, because it deserved to be received rather than responded to.
She looked across the room to where Neville was in conversation with Lupin and his mother, gesturing at something with the specific ease of someone who had forgotten to be careful about being seen.
'He is happy,' she said, with the quality of someone encountering evidence of something they had worked toward and hoped for and were still surprised to find.
'Yes,' Ron said. 'He is.'
She looked at Ron for one more moment. 'You are good for him,' she said, with the tone of a woman who chose her words with precision and meant every one. 'I am glad he has you.'
She moved away toward Neville before he had found an answer, which he thought she had probably intended.
The room began to empty in the gradual way of evenings that had been good and did not want to be ended abruptly.
Percy left first, with a handshake for Neville and Harry and the contained quality he had when he had been somewhere genuinely pleasant and was not going to make a production of it. The twins left together, Fred still holding Augusta's card, George reading it over his shoulder with the expression of a man encountering a piece of information that had changed his calculations.
Luna paused at the door and looked at the room with the quality she had when she was filing something. 'It's still here,' she said.
'What is?' Hermione said.
'The good feeling,' Luna said. 'From the creature in the roof. I thought it would go when people started leaving. But it hasn't yet.' She considered this. 'That means it was also the people.' She appeared satisfied with this conclusion and went through the door.
Hermione looked at the ceiling for a moment. Then at Ron.
'Don't,' he said.
'I wasn't going to,' she said, in the tone of someone who had been about to.
His parents Flooed home with Ginny. Lupin and Sirius left together, with the ease of two people who had more conversation to continue elsewhere and were not in a hurry to finish it. Neville and Augusta left last of the guests — Neville carrying the propagation case with the specific care of someone transporting something irreplaceable, Augusta walking beside him with the quality she had at the end of the evening, which was different from the quality she had had at the beginning. Less armoured, Ron thought. Not without her bearing — that would not go — but carrying it differently. As if the room had given her something too.
Ron and Harry were the last two standing.
Harry looked at the empty table, the guttered candles, the photograph on the windowsill where he had left it.
'I need to pick that up,' he said, and went to get it.
He held it for a moment, looking at himself at the gate.
'I'll put it in my room,' he said. 'At the Burrow.'
'Yes,' Ron said.
'And then at Hogwarts.'
'Yes.'
Harry tucked it carefully under his arm alongside the book.
They went down the narrow stair and out into the alley, where the July night was warm and the shops were closed and the cobblestones were more themselves than usual, the way they were after a good evening — familiar and slightly more themselves than usual.
Ron took a photograph of the alley before they went to the Floo. Not of Harry, not of anyone. Just the alley. The late light on the cobblestones, the closed shops, the ordinary summer night that had been, for a few hours, something worth keeping.
He knew where it would go.
After Harry's photograph, in the album. The night that had preceded the things that came next. Proof that there had been light before it.