September nineteenth was a Monday.
He had been planning it since August — not with anxiety, but with the specific attention he gave things he wanted to get right. The occasion was simple: a small gathering in the Room of Requirements on the evening of her birthday, the people who were hers in the way that mattered, food he made himself. The room would provide what was needed. What he brought was everything else.
He spent the two hours before dinner in the kitchens.
Sable received him without comment and gave him the corner station and the ingredients he had requested the previous week. He made a dark chocolate tart — not the tarte Tatin, which was its own thing for its own occasion, but something simpler and more particular: a short pastry shell, a ganache with a depth that came from time rather than technique, a small amount of fleur de sel at the finish that was either correct or wrong and he had decided was correct. He made it once and did not adjust it, because adjusting it would have been about him rather than about the tart.
He also made a small savory plate — three things, not more — because Hermione ate when she was interested and forgot to eat when she wasn't, and he had learned in three years that the way to ensure she ate was to put something in front of her that required no decision.
The Room produced a table the right size for six — Harry, Ginny, Neville, Luna, Hermione and himself— with the specific warmth of a room that understood what it was being used for. Candles rather than the cold white light of the study configuration. The right chairs.
They came in at eight. Hermione came last, which he had arranged without telling anyone he was arranging it — Harry and Ginny and Neville and Luna simply happened to be ready before she was, which was unusual enough on Hermione's part to mean she had wanted the entrance rather than been late for it.
She looked at the room.
'You made the tart,' she said.
'The ganache needed a day to set,' he said. 'So I made it yesterday.'
She looked at him with the expression she had when she had processed something and arrived at a feeling she wasn't going to perform. 'Right,' she said, and came and sat down.
The evening had the quality of a good evening — not because anything exceptional happened but because everyone in the room was genuinely glad to be in it, which was sufficient. Neville had brought a small pot of something from the Herbology greenhouse that he said was technically a succulent but behaved more like a mood indicator — its leaves shifted colour depending on the emotional register of the room, which Luna found immediately interesting and spent a significant portion of the evening testing. Harry had found a Muggle card in Hogsmeade that said something about birthdays and wisdom that was deeply incorrect and that Hermione read three times with increasing amusement before putting it in her bag.
Ginny had made something — a small carved figure, a heron in pale wood, finished with the specific quality Ginny's work had when she had been at it long enough. She handed it to Hermione without ceremony and Hermione turned it over in her hands and looked at it for a moment and said simply: 'This is very good, Ginny,' which was the correct response and which Ginny received without deflecting.
After the tart — which produced a silence from Hermione that was its own form of review — Ron said, 'I have something for you.' He had been holding the timing deliberately, saving the end.
'You made the tart,' she said again, in the tone of someone who had considered this sufficient and was reconsidering.
'The tart is separate,' he said, and reached into his jacket pocket.
The box was small — the kind a jeweler used, dark blue cardboard, no marking. He set it on the table in front of her.
She looked at it. Then at him. Then she opened it.
The necklace was silver, fine chain, the pendant small — a starflower in flat wirework, five petals in clean geometric arrangement, minimal. He had found the jeweler in a small street off Diagon Alley in August, a witch of seventy-odd who worked in the back of a shop that smelled of metal shavings and charmed light and who had listened to his description with the focused attention of a craftsperson given a clear brief.
Hermione was very still.
Around the table, the rest of the room had the specific quality of people performing absorbed interest in other things, which was its own form of attention.
She lifted the pendant from the box and held it up to the candlelight. The wirework caught it — not dramatically, but with the quiet quality of something made well. She looked at it for a moment that was long enough to be real.
'Starflower,' she said.
'Borage,' he said. 'Five-pointed. It has a minor astronomical connection — the shape, the name. I thought it suited you.'
She looked at him. Something moved through her expression that she didn't manage away entirely — the specific quality of someone who had been given something that had required the giver to look at them carefully and was reckoning with what that meant.
'Will you put it on?' she said.
He took the necklace from her. She turned slightly in her chair, lifting her hair from the back of her neck with one hand — the gesture was simple and entirely natural and produced in him the specific awareness of proximity that he was increasingly finding it necessary to manage. He fastened the clasp. His fingers were at her neck for perhaps three seconds.
She turned back around and looked down at the pendant resting at her collarbone. Then up at him.
'Thank you,' she said. Two words, stated with the full weight she gave things she meant entirely.
'Happy birthday,' he said.
Luna looked at the succulent on the table. Its leaves had gone a very warm yellow.
She said nothing about this, which was its own form of tact.