Victoire tries not to show how unhappy she is, but Teddy can see the lines around her mouth, always creased these days, turning down into a perpetual frown.
She brushes her hands across her stomach, smoothing, smoothing her shirt over the flat, hard plane of it. They don't talk about how much she and he wish for it to round, to bump and plump and overbalance her, tip her mouth over until it becomes a smile.
He thinks Harry sees it too, every other Sunday when he and Ginny come for dinner, but Harry just gives him a sympathetic half-smile and ruffles his hair. Harry's never been good at seeing people grow up and change, so he comforts him the same way he's done since Teddy was a baby, the only way he knows how.
When he was younger, before Hogwarts, before there was much of a world outside his grandmother's house, Teddy used to read his grandfather's books in the library. Ted Tonks, whose name he has, a name he loves as much as his color-changing hair, has one book, a book about animals, among his many other Muggle schoolbooks. Teddy read it curled up in the small triangle between the big armchair and the wall, as if what he was doing was somehow forbidden, because the part he liked best was about the mating rituals, pictures of chimpanzees swinging from treetops two by two and a chart that showed a horse and a donkey with a double arrow pointing to a mule, but nothing below it, no arrow leading on from there.
This is Teddy's legacy, Muggle schoolbooks and turquoise hair and the knowledge that cross-breeds cannot produce offspring.