Morning. The non-trivial peacefulness. The daylight. The ready-made brightness. An undetectable beginning. Peak grogginess.

Ron Weasley woke up. And he felt the drowsiness of a sunny morning. An essentially marginal feeling because that is how that worked. It was an intentionally bureaucratic process.

He turned onto his side and looked at the photo on the bedstand. The bushy-haired woman in the photo was asleep. But then very slowly she began to wake. She deliciously stretched her arms. Looked up and gave a smile in response to the surprise exposure. A second later, she was asleep again.

He turned onto his back again. Put his arms up and yawned upon an outrageous body stretch which felt really good. He looked up and listened.

Someone else was in the house.

He did not become panicky however. He threw the duvet off to the side. Sat up and put his feet on the floor and his hands to his sides. He was in position. Listened again for another second and tried to put together what the other person was up to. But that did not work well. He reached for his wand, grabbed it and walked out of the room.

Hermione Granger, the woman in the bedstand photo, was in the room in person. It looked as if she was half-through her attempt to give the place a cleanup. And her actions, by the look of it, showed some real competence in view of the difficulty of that initiative. From afar, Ron watched how she went at it remarkably, sizeably quietly and decided to wait till she turned around on her own and not to call on her to tell her he was off the bed. And expectedly it did not take very long for her to catch up.

'Hey' she said.

'Good morning.'

'I did not want to wake you up.'

'You didn't.'

'Good …' she remarked and looked around the large room, 'I decided to put some of your stuff away and clean it up a bit.'

Ron nodded as if to say 'I can see that.'

'Would you like to help?'

In his scotch-coated nazal voice Ron stated, 'Yeah'.

'Someone should do the dishes.'

However Ron made no attempt toward the counter. He just looked at her in a three-headed but nevertheless sweet-natured dog way. This was enough to make Hermione inwardly fidgety. And maybe Ron wanted to shake exactly that implicit reaction from her. It was largely an awkward exercise but he could not help it. He took great care to look for the crazy obscure throw of her head back, for her chin to come forward in the same obscure way only to take its initial position right after, for the close-ends of her eyebrows to go up, and for her lips to come apart as if to draw a wholesome breath. But first she had had to blow the resident carbon out and that was difficult.

The purpose to all this was perhaps to show once more that he did not imagine these particulars in numerous previous cases and, in part, also to give him the chance to be in his skin however apologetic that feeling always was bound to be.

Ron and Hermione were both 34 and they had two kids. But they no longer lived together. Hermione's work had taken her and the kids to Berlin five years ago. However work was not the reason for Hermione to leave England. A time came when they no longer were on each other's side. More to the point, they were not on each other's corner anymore. And that alone can sometimes be enough to make it feel as if the other person is someone up against whom your guard ought never to be down again and not someone to win back over. But, in Ron and Hermione's case, the problem had many dimensions. They were not the kind of people to be just happy to be burnt-outs. They were in an all-together different place. To begin with, they have always been way too protective of each other. And their adult life together just showed how principled a position that has been for both of them. In that respect, the post-war life had given them the chance to really grow up. They no longer needed to take to action; they discovered other ways to care for one another. However growing up in this way also had taken away their hard-headedness. And perhaps this was more difficult for both to deal with. For some reason, it all became too overwhelming. And, to some extent, made it less personal. Overall, a very sad place to be for the two and no better way to explain how sad other than by means of these health-clinic brochure type expressions.

Ron had enough suspense so he walked over to Hermione. And they clumsily kissed. Then he took his position by the kitchen sink. This was the beginning of their summertime back-together week. Every year kids made it out to the Burrow for what may be best described as a summer break and Hermione took a week off to see her friends, family, and Ron before the three of them went back to Berlin. This year however was a little different. Hermione decided her sojourn should be longer on account of how it was to be Rose's, their daughter's, first at Hogwarts. She explained her decision to Ron in a letter that she owled well in advance, however did not hear back from him but then again she had not expected to either. Ron was not a closetted Gildroy Lockhart.

'Did you get my letter?'

'Yes. Maybe it would be better if I first get the books and the work papers out of the way. What do you say?'

Hermione throw a look at Ron's work desk to the far side of the room, the two chairs and an arm chair made into a bed for several parcels of books and the knee-high stacks of paper and journals on the floor. And for a second, she was lost.

'Hermione?'

'Sorry what?' Hermione blurted absent-mindedly.

'Shall I put those away first?'

She looked at the bookshelves and saw that they were already overpopulated as it is.

'No' she said. 'No need.'

'Yes, I did get your letter. But I guess I had expected you to show up at the Burrow. Hence the mass.'

'No. I mean yes.' She looked at Ron. 'I mean … how come?'

'How come what?'

She half-puffed through her nose but mostly as an attempt to find her ground, and was all the more formal-looking when she explained, 'I would not like to impose on you.'

In mock-suprise Ron suggested, 'What? Out of principle?'

'Don't talk to me that way?'

Ron was quick to reclaim, 'How if I put it in a letter?'

She swerved away and as she made her way into the laundry room, she yelled at him, 'Yes. Books first and then dishes.'