The Grangers arrived at the Burrow on the sixteenth of August.
He had been watching for how Hermione would manage this — the specific quality she had when she was tracking multiple considerations simultaneously and trying not to let any of them show. She had the expression of someone who was prepared for approximately thirty distinct contingencies and was hoping none of them would be necessary.
Her parents came through the gate with the quality of Muggle professionals visiting a place that operated on different rules and were determined to respond to everything with open-minded competence. Daniel Granger was a tall man with Hermione's jaw and a dentist's habit of looking at things closely before forming an opinion. Emma Granger had Hermione's eyes and considerably more comfort with ambiguity than her husband, which did not mean she had less precision — only that she placed it differently.
His mother received them with the warmth she gave all people she had decided were worth the full version of it. His father shook Daniel Granger's hand with both of his and the expression of someone who had been given an extraordinary opportunity and was not going to waste it.
'I understand you've made significant use of fluoride treatments,' his father said.
'Dad,' Ron said.
'I have many questions,' Arthur said.
Hermione caught Ron's eye from across the garden. Her expression was the one she used for things that were mortifying and also slightly wonderful.
They had met her parents before — briefly at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters in second year before the start of term, and again in Diagon Alley during the shopping trip, in the brief specific context of a busy street and no real time for anything that counted as a proper conversation. Those meetings had been in passing; cordial, short. This was different. This was the meeting that mattered, conducted in full knowledge of what they were meeting about.
He had brought the Granger family's share of the bet as a sealed statement from Gringotts. He had not brought it out yet. This was not the first moment for that.
The first moment was tea, and his mother's soda bread, and his father's question about whether fluoride treatment was applied at the chair or in a separate room, and Hermione's parents gradually discovering that the Burrow was exactly what it appeared to be and not performing anything
Daniel Granger asked him about the relationship during a moment when Hermione was helping his mother set the table and Arthur was showing Emma the kitchen garden with the energy of someone who had been waiting for a receptive audience.
He did it directly, which Ron respected. Not threateningly, but with the clear quality of a father who had thought about what he needed to know and decided not to take an indirect route to it.
'She was unhappy at school in ways she didn't tell us,' he said. 'Before — before this.' He meant before Ron, which both of them understood without specifying. 'She was always Hermione. Brilliant and difficult and entirely herself. But there was something that was hard for her about being so much of herself in places that didn't quite fit it.'
Ron nodded.
'Since second year that changed,' Daniel said. 'We noticed it. I'd like to understand it.'
Ron thought about how to answer this honestly.
'Hermione is the most capable person I know,' he said. 'She has been since the first time I properly talked to her, which was first year, before the troll incident. I found that useful rather than uncomfortable, which I gather is not universal.' He paused. 'I never wanted her to be different. I wanted her to keep going in the direction she was already going. That seemed like the correct approach.'
Daniel Granger looked at him for a moment.
'She also wrote to us about the Chamber,' he said. 'When she was recovering. In ways she clearly felt were important.'
'She nearly died,' Ron said. 'There is no version of that I am comfortable with. There is only the version where she didn't, and what I am doing with that fact.'
A silence.
'Valentine's Day,' Daniel said.
'February fourteenth,' Ron confirmed. 'Hogsmeade. Tea. I gave her a book she hadn't read and she gave me a plant cutting for my room that I was not expecting, which I appreciated.'
Daniel Granger's expression did a brief thing that might, on another face, have been a smile.
'What are your intentions,' he said, not quite as a question and not quite not.
Ron considered the word 'intentions' and what it deserved.
'She's fourteen,' he said. 'I'm fourteen. My intention is for both of us to be fifteen, and sixteen, and to sit our OWLs and our NEWTs and do things we're proud of and be present for each other while we do them. I don't have a further plan than that because a further plan at fourteen is either naïve or controlling, and I don't intend to be either.'
Daniel Granger was quiet.
'That is an unusually clear answer,' he said.
'I've thought about it,' Ron said.
Hermione found him in the garden after dinner, where he had gone to check on the duelling posts and, more accurately, to give the Grangers time to talk to his parents without him in the room.
'What did my father say to you,' she said. Not a question.
'He asked about the relationship,' Ron said. 'I answered. He asked about my intentions. I answered that too.'
She looked at him with the expression she used when she was trying to determine whether she needed to be worried.
'He seemed satisfied,' Ron said. 'Or as close to it as a father of a fourteen-year-old daughter is going to be.'
She was quiet for a moment, standing beside him in the garden in the late evening, the sky doing the particular blue it did in August before it fully darkened.
'My mum asked about you too,' she said.
'What did you tell her?'
'I told her you were infuriating and precise and that you read things I hadn't read yet and that you never once made me feel like too much,' she said, in the tone she used for factual reporting. 'In that order.'
He looked at the sky.
'Good order,' he said.
She leaned against him, briefly, in the specific way she did when she was not making a statement about it and not requiring a statement back — just placing the fact of it in the air between them and letting it be.
He took a photograph of the back garden the next morning, in the light before anyone else was up, and didn't caption it, but knew what it was for.