It's nine fifteen, Thursday night.
If it were last week, then our living room would be filled with people at this hour. Order meetings are held on Monday and Thursday nights anymore, beginning promptly at nine. Members come when they can, when they can get away without being noticed, whatever their situation would be. After the old headquarters burned, surprisingly from a Muggle electrical problem and not Death Eater activity, James had taken it upon himself to volunteer our home as a meeting place when I was out helping Professors McGonagall and Flitwick with enchantments at Hogwarts.
Needless to say, I wasn't thrilled. There's something like a hundred Order members and though I believe strongly in what I do, I also believe in the value of a good cleaning charm, preferably when I don't have to recast it three times a week. The kinds of people that fight against the Dark Lord aren't exactly the sort I would socially align myself with otherwise. Mundungus Fletcher, for example, came so drunk to one of those early meetings at our house that he passed out behind the sofa upstairs and we didn't find him until the next day. Shirley Podmore is another one I quickly learnt to watch out for. She's kind as can be but also rather absentminded and not so steady with a wand.
But as angry as I was about my grandmother's broken lamp and spaghetti stains on the carpet and couch cushions and by some odd chance the wall, I began to enjoy the twice-weekly gatherings at our house. After all, it's no worse than when Sirius tracks mud in.
Voldemort might be growing stronger everyday, but the Order is growing as well. So many witches and wizards, I assumed, were afraid to defy him or already in his ranks. But then James and I found ourselves in the heart of the defense movement and I see how we've grown as well. What began as a small assembly of Dumbledore's truest friends and brightest students has grown into a small glimmer of hope amid all the destruction.
On Sundays, Margaret Wharton and her boys, Tyler and Kennedy, would always come by. While Margaret would help me clean and cook and bake, the boys would help James and Sirius set up the house. She'd tell me great stories about their childhood and answer whatever questions she could about my own pregnancy.
On Mondays, Molly Weasley would arrive almost at the crack of dawn, always with a handful of redheaded children in tow. She'd help me pick up where Margaret and I had started the day before, wagging her wand almost constantly at her two-year-old twins. Molly calmed more fears of mine than even Margaret. She was pregnant for the fifth time during those months. After the meetings, she'd make fast work picking up the living room until Wednesday, when Dumbledore himself was prone to stop by to visit and see how things would go Thursday.
On Fridays, Remus and Peter were the likely ones to hang around. They'd help James clean the house, but only because I threatened them with curses they'd scarcely heard of before. It would be two days of solitude, hopefully, and back again to do the exhausting routine once more.
And that's not to include the houseguests that we had every evening for six months or the owls that arrived at every hour of the night and day.
Tonight I sigh as I walk around our empty living room. It took Dumbledore so long to find new headquarters for the Order—perhaps because our house provided such a nice meeting spot—that I'd grown rather accustomed to the loud nuances of its members. Apparently, the new place is very nice, an old, abandoned castle near Hogwarts. I'm too pregnant to Apparate, so I sent James off an hour before, to Sirius's, telling him just what I'd do if they got so caught up in Quidditch statistics they forgot when they were supposed to be there.
I wonder how the meeting's going. I wonder if anyone would rather it be here.
I never though I'd like playing hostess, but that's before the Headmaster pulled James and Frank and Alice and I aside as the last of the Order departed from our place for the last time Monday. Apparently a prophecy was made that likely pits our unborn child or theirs against the Dark Lord in his final moments. Dumbledore can't be sure. He seems to think that Voldemort will mark one of the children as his equal, which makes dread settle in my stomach alongside our baby. It scares me to think that our child—given James's family, probably our son—might end up with that responsibility. And though it is horrible, I find myself wishing to make my August due date and not deliver even a day sooner. Let the Longbottom child shoulder that burden.
As I shuffle from the living room to the kitchen, I'm suddenly struck with the desire to ask James if he feels the same way, but I can't because he's hundreds of miles away. If the Order still met here, than I could, and maybe then I wouldn't feel so empty.