I was rereading the end and was again unsettled by the thought of a Ron/Hermione pairing and then this evolved. Please read and review. All the usual disclaimers apply about me not owning anything :)

"When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory."

The wooden tablet was a wedding gift but now, nearly 16 years later she couldn't remember who had gifted it to them. One of her Muggle relatives, most likely.

She wondered if it would have made her pause and think if she had come upon it before she murmured a giddy yes to his proposal. In hindsight, she realised their conversations had all been about shared friends and shared duties including child rearing, but never about common pursuits, because they didn't have any. She couldn't stand a dissection of Quidditch, which was a topic that could make him unusually voluble. He didn't understand her research and she always felt she was being condescending in her explanation, seeming to oversimplify it for ease of consumption. No, they wouldn't have been able to converse well in old age unless the conversations were about meals or bowel movements, which a lot of old people she had known seemed to talk at length about. At any rate, there was no way she would know now.

She picked up the wooden tablet and started rolling it in the bubblewrap. So many years surrounded by magic and still she found her Muggle roots breaking through; she needed to do some things by hand, setting aside her wand. It helped her slow down, to think, to breathe more easily, to take stock, whether it was a smile-stimulating moment of joy she was pondering or tears-inducing grief. Right this moment, though, there were no tears and no smiles. Just sighs. She was packing away 16 years of a life she had built brick by brick with the man she thought she loved, only to discover that the love was not enough. That when the children were sent off to school and the humdrum dealt with, she yearned for more.

It was an undefined quantity, this more. It seemed to have no parameters, no identifiable measure. She had told him, after months of thought, that she didn't think she wanted to be married any more but she hadn't told him that she didn't know precisely what it was she wanted. Maybe what she wanted was a chance to go back and get a do-over. To have a chance 16 years ago to see what her life would be if like she said yes to marrying him, a chance to see what having kids was like, a chance to see what being a working mother, being a dutiful daughter-in-law entailed. In the anticlimax of victory, her self-image, shaped by terms like 'bushy-haired buck-toothed know-it-all', led her to believe this was her best option and she had clung eagerly to what was offered. Would a life of study, of research have been more rewarding? Would a life without dirty diapers and someone else's teenage angst have been more blissful? She had no way of knowing. And it was too late to find out. She loved her children and, in some fashion, her husband as well. But she knew now that she could have given up a life that had grown lonely for a marriage, even one that entailed settling for something less, if the single life of study got too tedious, but she could never stop being a mother once she had committed to it. Not ever.

What was this, then? This unease, this dissatisfaction, this restlessness. It had no name. It was vague but it was there and its presence could no longer be ignored. So, this strange decision, unfathomable to friends and family and troubling to her kids. She was packing up and leaving with no destination in sight, after unyoking herself from some responsibilities but with the burden of shaping something recognisable, something definite out of the vast abyss that currently only spelt 'I need'.