The dinner at the Grangers was on the twenty-ninth of August.
He and Hermione took the Knight Bus from the Burrow, which Hermione endured with the practiced discipline of someone who had accepted that the Knight Bus was the available option and that her opinion of it was not relevant to its operation. He had learned to find this specifically her.
He had thought about the gift for two weeks. Not because he was uncertain about what to bring — he had known roughly since the feast, when he had watched Daniel Granger identify the wine and adjust his reading accordingly. The gift needed to be something that had been chosen for them specifically, not presented as a gesture. They were people who noticed the difference.
He brought a bottle of Château Margaux 1982 — an exceptional vintage, the kind Daniel Granger would recognise without being told the year — and a jar of wizarding honey from a small producer in Wales whose bees were kept in proximity to magical orchards and whose honey had a quality that was not magic and not not-magic but sat in the threshold between the two, which he thought appropriate. He wrapped both in brown paper and carried them under his arm on the Bus while Hermione gripped the seat.
The Grangers lived in a terraced house in Hampstead that had the quality of people who valued books and natural light and had made certain specific decisions about how to arrange a home around both of those priorities. The sitting room had floor-to-ceiling shelves that Hermione had clearly grown up in front of, and a kitchen that was smaller than the Burrow's but had the quality of a kitchen that was used properly.
Emma Granger opened the door. She looked at the brown paper parcel, and at Ron, and her expression had the quality it had had at the World Cup morning — the revised estimate.
'Come in,' she said.
Daniel Granger was in the kitchen. He shook Ron's hand with the directness he had shown in the garden and said: 'You brought wine.'
'And honey,' Ron said. 'The honey is wizarding. It's worth trying, if you're open to it.'
Daniel looked at the jar for a moment. 'Is it safe?'
'Entirely,' Ron said. 'It just tastes somewhat more than ordinary honey. Like the difference between good bread and excellent bread.'
Daniel considered this. 'What's the mechanism?'
'The bees are kept near magical flowering plants,' Ron said. 'The honey carries a trace of it. Nothing medical. Just better.'
'Hm,' Daniel said, in the tone of a man applying clinical standards to a novel case and finding the evidence unexpectedly plausible.
He put the honey on the counter. He opened the wine.
Dinner was roast lamb and good conversation.
Emma Granger was interested in his previous-life cooking, which Hermione had apparently described in terms that had prompted her mother's curiosity. He answered what he could answer honestly — that he had cooked South Indian food as a much younger man, in different circumstances, and that the cookbook was something he was not yet ready to open but intended to.
Emma received this with the quality of someone who did not require the full picture to take an accurate measurement.
Daniel asked about the Healing practical arrangement with Madam Pomfrey, which Hermione had mentioned. He talked about that — the OWL and NEWT theory, the gaps in practical knowledge, the straightforward desire to be able to do something useful if a situation required it. He talked about it in the way he was comfortable talking about preparation: not as anxiety, but as method.
Daniel listened in the way he had at the World Cup and in the garden.
'Hermione mentioned you were ahead in your year,' he said. 'That's an understatement, isn't it.'
'It's accurate,' Ron said. 'In some subjects.'
'In most subjects,' Hermione said, from across the table, in the tone of someone correcting the record.
Ron looked at her. 'Not Astronomy,' he said.
'Astronomy,' she said, 'is a question of prioritisation, not ability, and you know that.'
Emma looked between them with the expression of someone watching a specific kind of dynamic operate in real time and finding it accurately described by what she'd been told.
'You argue like people who like each other,' she said.
'We are people who like each other,' Hermione said. 'It's not a coincidence.'
He helped clear the plates, which appeared to be unexpected — Emma reached for them at the same moment and they were briefly occupying the same space in the kitchen, and she looked at him with the quality she had brought to the whole evening.
'You'll do,' she said, quietly, with the tone of a final assessment delivered with precision rather than warmth and meaning both.
He brought the plates to the counter.
'Thank you for dinner,' he said. 'It was very good.'
'Yes,' she said. 'You're welcome.'