"You're a damned fool, Hermione Granger."
"That may well be, Malfoy, but we're just going to have to live with it."
He looked crestfallen, sitting there on the settee next to her, gripping her fingers as if his life depended on it. "What if I can't?" he said.
Hermione looked away, half in exasperation, half in anguish. "Do you have any idea how guilty I feel, not just about you, but about all of this? I never should've—"
"Never should have been with me? Don't you dare say that, Granger. I mean it."
She sighed and met his eyes again. "I can't help thinking it might have been easier."
"Easier isn't the same as better. Believe me, I know about that one." He shook his head almost absently, and said, "Do you really think that everything we've had together wasn't worth it?" He was gazing at her intently now, and shook her by the arms when she tried to avert her gaze. "It's been over five years, Hermione. You do realise that, don't you? You have five years of memories of us being together, and you wish none of it had ever happened? You wish we'd never taken that holiday to China, you wish we'd never spent all those long weekends in bed, you wish we'd never spent all those hours lying in the meadows in the sun, you wish we'd never had all that fantastic, blow-your-mind sex... you wish we'd never even kissed?"
Hermione sighed, feeling tears well up behind her eyes and finding herself again trying to avoid looking at him – but eventually she made herself do it. "I'm pregnant," she told him.
She could see his chest stop moving as his breath caught in his throat. "You mean...?"
"It's Ron's, Malfoy." There. Now she could look away.
"Are you sure?"
She looked at him once more, and lied. "Yes." She swallowed, made herself continue, "He's asked me to marry him. Do the right thing by the child, you know."
"And you said yes?" Malfoy said incredulously.
Hermione nodded.
"But you told me you didn't feel that way about him. You told him you didn't feel that way about him!"
"Maybe I was wrong."
There was a long pause. Then: "You coward." The way he said it made it worse than the filthiest of curses.
"I'm sorry."
"Not as much as you will be, Granger. I guarantee it. You'll regret it, and you know you will."
Hermione found herself unable to reply. So she watched, silently, as Draco Malfoy walked out of her life.