Her mother walked tall, an obvious attempt to be strong while her youngest daughter went through a solid brick wall to live a life that she could not even dream of. She did dream of it, though. She dreamed of what it would be like to live in a fantastic castle with changing staircases, harmless ghosts, and enchanted ceilings. She would love to spend all of her days dreaming about this place, or better yet going with her daughter on the adventure of a lifetime, but the reminder of her reality of a normal person, a non magical person, sat in the backseat of her station wagon.
"Is she gone?" Petunia asked. Her mother would have liked to think that it was a sad question, but she knew that dream was as unrealistic as going to live in a magical world with her younger daughter. She sighed because she could hear the unspoken "yet" at the end of that sentence.
"Yes, she's gone."
The smile that she saw on her daughter's face broke her heart. It was not a sad smile, nor was it was "good for her" smile. It was the smile that you get when you see that the smartest person in class got a D on a homework assignment. It was the smile that you get when you realize that your biggest competition in life was out of the game.
She chose not to say anything.
She chose no to say anything when Lily returned from school for the first Christmas and Petunia would not come out of her room if "that freak" was going to be there, too. She chose not to say anything when Petunia ripped the pages out of Lily's school book, silently giving Lily the money to replace it the next time they went into London.
Was it wrong of her to want to keep the peace? Was she really doing her daughter wrong? Both of them?
These thoughts often came to her at night when she had a hard time sleeping. If she had said something, would things have turned out differently? Would Petunia be this hateful to anyone different than herself, and would it be her fault? Would Lily go through her life allowing people to step on, quietly taking whatever was dished out to her?
She didn't know the answer, but she felt better when she pretended she was sleeping under an enchanted ceiling in a magical castle far away from all of her problems.