She was in love.

She had been before. At least, she'd thought she'd been in love. Maybe that was why her marriage had fallen apart. Because she had had doubts about her feelings and she'd doubts about his too.

He didn't love her.

She knew that now, but at the beginning, oh it had been wonderful. The excitement and the thrill and the sheer adrenaline pumping through her veins had made her stupid. Far more stupid than those books she'd been constantly reading. She'd read about love and she had all the symptoms—as if love was a disease, though, she supposed, it might be—fluttering in the stomach and heart, blushing when she thought him, smiling at the mention of his name, mistaking her affection for him to be frustration when he was too lazy to do his own work.

For all his posturing about fairness and equality, he too was prejudiced.

In their first fight, he'd even brought it up. Her blood status. Her supposedly dirty blood and how that somehow made him superior to her despite the fact that she'd made far better pay than he ever had or would and despite the fact that she was just as good, perhaps even better, a mother as his own.

He was cheating on her.

She knew from the moment his lips went to shape a name that wasn't hers in bed, that he was seeing someone else. He'd tried to blend the beginning of his mistress's name and her together to form some weird, abstract combination of the two. She'd gotten out of bed and kicked him out of the house. 'Let his toy warm him,' she'd thought as she gotten dressed and packed up everything she and the children owned before going to her parents.

They got divorced.

It was a messy legal battle with the government turned against her from the beginning but somehow, probably with Harry's help, she'd gotten half of everything he owned, the children, and his dignity. The press had had a field day.

He'd gotten angry.

He showed up one night, drunk and reeking of cheap alcohol, demanding that she let him see his children and left only when she'd pointed her father's shiny revolver in his face. She'd then called the police and reported him. He was served a restraining order with violation penalties pending on over twenty-five thousand—more than he had ever had.

He tried to take her children.

Or, he had until he'd found out Hugo was a squib. Until he'd found out that Hugo didn't want to follow in his father's footsteps, he wanted to be a dentist, just like his grandpa and grandpa. Then he had focused on Rose and she had gotten angry because he made her little boy cry and her little girl scared of leaving her mother.

It'd been twelve years since anyone had seen him.

Her babies were grown up now and studying abroad and she was left with all the free time she could want to read and write her novels. She was a fairly successful author now, petitioning for equality while simultaneously researching the new animals that popped up around the globe. She was happily remarried, to Harry of all people, after his wife—her ex-husband's sister—had been found cheating and stealing from his family vaults. It'd been eleven years since anyone had heard from her, though the last time they'd seen each other, she'd been a raving, screaming, clawing mess of jealous, anger, and greed.

No, she thought, she didn't love him. She hadn't for a very long while.