The wolves had followed him for an hour now.

‘So when you were looking for a place to live, did you set up a contest for “most twee city in Britain”?’

Rose was only a little surprised when Selena appeared at her door with a bottle of wine and declared, ‘We’re going out.’

‘This is your father’s warehouse,’ said Rose as they appeared with the spinning-crack of Apparition in the wide open space.

‘Dad can get us a portkey to Denmark, if it is in Denmark,’ said Matt, bent over the map laid out on the table in their safehouse. ‘But from there we’re on our own.’

They sat in a tent, wayward friends and lovers and traitors and enemies, and gathered to listen to the tales of a dead man.

'Potter, they got the job done -'

‘Do you want a coffee?’ Scorpius blurted the moment he’d shut the door behind Rose.

Albus didn’t wait for a response before he dragged Scorpius in, gaze sweeping around the flat in a calm, authoritative manner.

‘I’ll put some leftovers away for your father,’ said Ginny, hauling the platter with the remains of roast beef off the table.

The Muggles had built the Gare d’Orsay over a hundred years ago, one of the latest stations built in Paris to play hub to the blossoming rail network.

What had once been a bustling centre of international travel, espionage, and operations was now a gloomy and dusty warehouse, but still Matt stood in the centre of his father’s old base and saw what could be.

Scorpius had been left in a sombre silence for the rest of their time at Niemandhorn, and Rose was at first prepared to take that as normalcy.

Once again Selena stood in front of Scorpius’ hotel room door and hammered on it.

‘So why have you come to me for help?’ said Selena, eyeballing Eva Saida with suspicion.

‘The Chalice was a matter of myth even eight hundred years ago,’ said de Sablé with honest apology. ‘I regret to say I do not know how it fell into the hands of the Templars, but we did not understand it even then. Most knights accepted it at face value as a gift from the Lord, and I was not involved in the decision to bear it with us to the Holy Land.’

The South African Department of Magic reminded Albus of the Ministry.

Investigating a shipwrecked freighter in a frozen land of eternal night was not one of her brightest ideas.

Sunlight clawed through a gap in the curtains to land directly on Selena’s face, but when she rolled over to escape it she found herself in the empty, warm hollow in the bed left by Matt’s body.

Rose didn’t haul on the reins to bring the carriage to a thundering halt of skidding ice and whipping winds until the ground stopped quaking underneath.

‘The Portkey back to England’s due tomorrow morning,’ said Hermione, ducking through the white canvas flap and into the bunkroom.

So, this is it. Scorpius sat on a wet bench on a rain-slicked stretch of Diagon Alley and stared at the door across the road. My last afternoon in this world is filled with perfect English weather.

Teddy and Victoire’s wedding was four days after the ritual, so when there was a knock on the safehouse door Eva thought she was going to be arrested again.

Eva sat at the open window, feet dangling free in the cold air, and smoked a cigarette like a teenager trying to hide the smell.

‘It’s hard to believe that two months ago I spent most of my time in a boring safehouse in Copenhagen,’ groaned Scorpius. ‘That was pretty miserable.’

‘Lillian Rourke,’ said Draco Malfoy, sipping from his refilled teacup, ‘backed the Council of Thorns since the earliest days.'

Knowing and knowing were two different things.

Scorpius had been interrogated by Auror Santiago before, but that was in a different life when he’d been a hero.

Scorpius’ reunion with Astoria lasted maybe another hour of awkward conversations and tentative plans for the future.