分卷阅读17（2 / 2）

It’s Harry that talks him into it. “If I had a mother,” He had said, eyes intense and voice quiet. “Nothing would stop me from seeing her.”

Draco had wanted to scream at him. To say that he was wrong, that he couldn’t keep saying things like this and thinking it was fair. That this time, he didn’t know what it was like. But Draco still found himself visiting her anyways.

She lives in a flat in Paris, renting from some muggle woman who was trying to be a painter but wasn’t quite making it there. The whole thing smells like paint fumes and scented candles, and the steps are so twisted and narrow that he isn’t sure how she makes it up them, but its still a nice place, just as comfortable and expensive looking as the manor.

She had a certain way of life, his mother, and she wasn’t going to let a little thing like a war standing in the way of how she wants to live.

“Draco.” His mother breathes out his name, and then she is hugging him, crushing him. The guilt threatens to swallow him when he thinks of all the letters he did not answer, but even now this is too much, too soon. “I’m so glad to see you.”

“Me too.” Because he was. He loved this woman, even if she was wrong, even if she only did the right thing because of the need for the family name to survive. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

She does not tell him that it is alright, or that she forgives him. He doubts very much that either of these things were true. She does, however, move aside and let him come in, to this house with its too many candles and strange paintings. Draco lets her give him the tour, looking at the picture frames showing the image of a family he cannot remember ever being and the misshapen pottery on the mantle.

“Do you like it?” Her voice has a forced brightness about it, and he does not know if it is because of him or if she simply does not have the same energy that she used to. “I took up pottery. Abigail talked me into it.”

Abigail was the girl downstairs, the one with paint stuck under her nails and colored scarfs hanging from a rack in her kitchen. He had to walk through her flat to get to his mother’s.

His mother, though, was not someone he knew. The woman he remembered would not be seen taking a pottery class, and would not display them out where anyone can see them. It was strange to know how fast things can change.

They have tea.

She cooks for herself now. It seems like she’s spent these past six months trying to find things to create, and she’s been going to cooking classes, so he gets fed little cakes and tiny sandwhiches and the tea has a taste that he cannot put his finger on, which makes him think it was from leaves that she grew herself.

It goes good, for as much as they don’t talk about the things they know they must talk about. They talk about other things instead, like Draco’s newfound success in potions (I read it in the paper, I’m so proud of you) and the herbs growing on the windowsill (yes, well, I’m trying my hand at gardening, and those seemed easiest). But in the end, the conversation turns to his father, as he knew it would have to.

“Have you been to see him?” She takes a sip of her tea, purses her lips and levels her stare at him. Draco hates that, how she can stay so calm and he himself be so upset. “I assume you haven’t.”

“No.” Draco did not want to see his father, and he certainly didn’t want to see him in chains, dirty and defeated. He did not want to have to lay eyes on him, because then he would be forced to deal with the question of how one man could be so wrong.

“Haven’t had the time?” Her voice is high, purposefully light. The game of politeness.

“It’s been crazy.” He was stumbling over excuses, like he was five years old again and she was asking why he hadn’t returned the fire message from the overly nosy neighbor next door. “With the potions project…and Weasley’s collection…and Harry, of course, I had to get used to that.”

“Your own father,” she said, leaning back and folding her hands together. There was ice in her voice and he stares at her hands instead of her face, looking at the perfectly manicured nails. “And you won’t even see him.”