Prologue

Shattered

All the air was sucked from her lungs as the piece of paper slipped from her fingers. Hot tears gathered in her eyes and began to slide down her cheeks. The ink smeared and the paper crumbled until all that was left was a pile of soggy black paper on the floor.

Her heart seemed to stop as she thought of the words written on the parchment paper that had just dropped to the ground. It couldn't be real. It was the sickest of jokes. A lie. She had only to read it one time to memorize it.

Hermione,

I don't want to be with you any more. I hate you with every fiber of feeling in my body. I lied when I told you I was in love you. I'm not … I don't even like you. The thought of kissing your ugly face always makes me sick.

I only went out with you so that you would do my homework without complaining about it so much. I've been cheating on you all school year with Lavender. I was only your friend because you let me copy your homework, and because you saved me from detention in first year.

I think you're ugly, needy, and a snob who thinks she knows everything. I don't ever want to see you again, don't talk to me. If you send an owl back I'll ignore it. You want to know the truth? I could never love you, because you are an ugly, filthy know-it-all mudblood!

I'm not like the rest of my family. I'm not a filthy blood-traitor and I'm not going to ever be with you.

Ronald Weasley

Maybe it was Draco Malfoy trying to play an evil prank on her! Or one of the other Slytherin jerks. They were the only people that had ever called her a mudblood. The thought brightened her momentarily, but Pig had brought the letter.

She shook her head. No. That wouldn't be it. Nobody knew about first year. Nobody except Harry knew that Ron had told her he loved her. She laid back and cried silently. This realization renewed her tears. She began to sob in a fit of uncontrollable sadness. What was wrong with her? Why did he suddenly hate her so much?

But he had told her what was wrong with her… and apparently, this hatred wasn't sudden. He had always hated her… but never said anything. He'd always pretended to be her friend, always pretended to love her.

She couldn't breathe. She had… she had loved him, and only him, more than any other person in the world. Her heart had been his… and he'd mutilated it. She eventually found that the world around her was growing hazy. She welcomed it. She wanted to sleep.

She wanted… to be free. She welcomed the though of sleep. She wanted to sleep and never wake up. Far away from the feeling of not being good enough for the only guy she had ever loved in her entire life. Far away from the sad, heart-broken thoughts that pushed their way into her consciousness.

So she slowly cried herself into a deep, dreamless sleep.

She wasn't sure exactly how long she slept, but it was dark in her bedroom, whereas it had been morning when Ron's letter had arrived.

The letter.

Her tears were like the ocean waves, crashing to the shore that was her cheeks. One ray of sun found its way through her curtains and illuminated the full length, thinly black-framed mirror a few feet away from the end of her bed.

Her long, auburn hair reached her shoulders in a mass of bushy bed-head. Her skin was peach and freckled. Her eyes were brown and red from crying, with heavy bags under as though she hadn't just slept a day's full time. Her repression filled her with a mixture of overpowering rage and misery.

Reflected back at her through this mirror was everything that Ron hated. The reason she was miserable. Reflected back at her was a snob. An ugly, needy, know-it-all mudblood that the guy she loved… hated.

An expensive ocher colored ceramic lamp sat on her bedside table, in the perfect spot to allow nighttime reading in bed. The thin clear cord came unplugged as she reached out in a single, swift movement and tore the lamp fiercely from its place and hurled it across the room.

The lamp and mirror crashed into contact with each other. A loud, banging crash signaled the break of both fragile objects. The sound the lamp made was short, deep and loud as it broke; the mirror a higher, longer crash as the shattered glass crashed to her lightly tinted wooden floor.

The movement in the room forced the thick, dark green velvet curtain back over the small bit of exposed window and the momentary sunlight became blackness once more. Hermione's entire body shook with a mixture of a million feelings and thoughts that moved so quickly they were hard to sort out.

She didn't want to sort them out. She wanted to not think. She wanted to sleep...