Hermione doesn't know a lot about love.
Perhaps love in butterflies in your stomach, fluttering eyelashes, and subtle flirtations.
Perhaps love is what she reads in the books she hides under her bed-passion and fire, touches and moans.
Perhaps love is marriage and children and commitment and a long life spent together.
Perhaps love is knowing someone fully and still staying with them.
She thinks that maybe love is all of these, spun by time into a complex web of thrumming emotion and beating hearts. How can she know? She's never experienced such things.
But maybe love starts with a choked and long-awaited apology. Maybe love is grown when she sees a not-so-mean blonde boy lounging in the sunlit library, reading a well-worn, well-loved book. Maybe love advances when sometimes, she says something funny and he smiles lopsidedly at her and for a moment she forgets how to breathe. Maybe love is realized with a first kiss, soft and a little awkward, but perfect all the same. Maybe love is the barely heard words of affection spoken in the flickering light of dying embers.
Maybe, just maybe, she knows love after all.