Pansy liked to think of herself as a widow.

She wasn't married. She was never married. But the man she presumed she would engage in such relationships was long since dead to her.

Pansy Parkinson had been a spiteful, pug-faced, washboard-bodied teenager. Her clothes sagged in the areas where anyone else would have curves, and her hair was dark and lank. Of course, Draco Malfoy would never look at her like that. Draco Malfoy just enjoyed her being there, someone else he could rely on to fall back on, should he need to. She was just another, easy Slytherin girl, hanging off his every word and seeing the sun shining out of his...

Well, things had changed. Times had changed. Pansy had changed.

She'd grown up, for one thing. In her thirties, she still wasn't in any relationship or bearing any children, but due to her lack of these factors, her age certainly wasn't showing on her face. Her body had filled out, at last. She could wear tight-fitting clothes without feeling like she had the body of a small boy. Her hair thickened, though it was still straight, it was longer, with more volume. As she left her teenage years, the odd spot of acne had disappeared, leaving her with smooth skin she'd yearned for since she was thirteen.

Pansy could have Draco if she wanted now, even if he was metaphorically attached by a harness to that pointy-faced Greengrass girl.

His collar had definitely been loosened when they strolled past each other on Diagon Alley. He was buying Hogwarts supplies for his child. She was visiting someone who needed what she had to offer, as much as she needed what he had.

"Pansy?" The smirk was back on his face almost as quickly as it had left. His icy blue eyes flickered up and down her body, quite obviously checking her out. Pansy's heart fluttered, and for a brief moment, she felt like that ugly teenager again.

She wasn't going to be that ugly teenager, ever again.

"Draco," she had replied dismissively, and brushed straight past him briskly, without looking back. No way, was Pansy Parkinson going to spend the rest of life doing complicated decimal subtractions to find a reaction with Draco Malfoy, like she had done for almost her entire seven years at Hogwarts. She slid a key into a lock in a door down a conjoined street. He had been infuriating; he still was infuriating, just meeting his gaze was infuriating. She stomped up the moth-eaten carpeted stairs angrily. She'd cornered the pictures she still had of Malfoy so much they'd been whittled to tiny shreds. She hadn't done that for nothing. The heart-shaped locket that kept his stolen passport photograph; she had hurled off the Astronomy tower after the battle in her seventh year, unsatisfied until she heard the tell-tale splash of it landing in the lake. Her tongue had prodded the inside of her mouth thoughtfully for far too long.

This way, Pansy could kill Draco from her heart, without actually driving a blade through his chest.

This was simpler. Meeting him was simpler.

Ronald Weasley had problems too. His wife loved another. Pansy was free. Pansy knew that she could make him feel free.

Pansy didn't have to dance, show off, and act around, to get his attention.

With Ron, she didn't have to be another wife in waiting.