I saw my father again that summer, the meeting as ill-advised and I as ill-prepared for it as ever. We sat in the same room, on opposite sides of the same table. The place had already crept into the unseen corners of my mind, and now it was a pattern. I was a year older. Different Aurors were on guard. Aside from that, nothing had changed.

He smiled when he saw me.

"Ah, Nathaniel," he said. "Have you read the memoir I gave you last year?"

It was the little, leather-bound book. I had. The only remarkable thing about it was how incredibly little it revealed. I nodded.

"Perhaps you should read it again. A good book is always better on the second reading. Or even the seventh."

That alarmed the Aurors, though I didn't know why.

"You know, my father said, "I went to school with the Dark Lord himself, though of course he wasn't known as such. I was the one who found him."

The Aurors were hanging on his every word now, and he drew my attention to them with a nod. I looked over my shoulder as he indicated.

"So," he said, reclaiming my attention immediately, "how have you been doing in school?"

"I've been having lessons with a teacher. Professor Snape. It's how I've been learning magic most."

"Severus Snape, was it?"

I nodded.

"Yes, he was quite talented. And rarely recognized, a resource left untapped. You will do well indeed to make use of him."

My heart thrilled at the thought that my father and I had both seen the same unrealized potential. Even the black-hooded wardens of Azkaban could not take that happiness from me, it was so desperate.

"And your other classes?" he asked.

I went through my classes one by one, telling him everything I'd learned and everything the other teachers hadn't taught me about their subjects. I would have done anything to see that spark of pride in my father's eyes as he watched me, that fierce triumph. As frigid as his smile was, it meant the world to me.

All children really love their parents. All children want to be loved by their parents.

When our time together was coming to a close, he rose slowly and carefully from his seat, unfolding his wiry frame meticulously. The Aurors tensed but made no move to stop him. He walked over to me and patted my head, just like he had the first time I'd met him, a year earlier.

What's the worst lie a parent can tell their child? I love you.

Then the visit was over, luckily without the chaotic brutality of the first one. It still left its mark, though, and I still depended on the Wednesday afternoon group to help me deal with it and forge it into an understanding.

But the rift between me and the rest of the group was widening. It's important in a setting like that not to try to keep any secrets, and I had secrets that I was forbidden from telling by the aptly, named Statute of Secrecy.

I tried not to make it matter, but I was always asking myself, how do I talk about this thing? Is this particular lie one that I can maintain? Am I being as honest as I possibly can? And it distracted me from being fully present in the group.

That's when I started talking to Finny. She was just one person, as damaged and imperfect as any of us, and she didn't hold me to such a high standard of honesty and candidness. Besides, we had something in common: our fathers were in prison because of a war. She thought it was the same war, and while I knew differently, I found that it didn't matter terribly much. Everything else, everything important, I could tell her.

When I returned to school that second year, I found that little had changed, save for Hermione Granger having suddenly taken an interest in me. That day in Diagon Alley, she must have realized that I was as avid a learner as she herself was, and that my unremarkable performance in class was balanced by some knowledge to which she now wanted access.

Did you think she and I were natural allies? Any outsider might have done so. The two students who worked hardest in their studies, there was no reason we shouldn't have been close friends.

But the truth was, we were more different than we were alike. She wanted the glory of recognition in academic success, and I wanted the obvious power of being the biggest magical badass out there. Neither of these desires were particularly noble, but don't you dare think less of either of us for that. It's important to want things for yourself, or else you can't want the right things for others.

And you have to be careful what you damn someone for.

You remember the way Hermione was about Lockheart? Actually, I doubt Weasley ever let her live it down. But I don't think you ever realized what it meant to her.

She thought she'd found a kindred spirit, someone who had everything she wanted—recognition, even adoration—and had gotten it by being smart. It was only natural that she fit those feelings into the pattern of an adolescent girl's first crush. Even when she started to doubt how genuine he really was, she kept going on and on about him when we would study together, and I knew well enough to keep quiet and listen. You know, I think she actually cried when he was revealed to be nothing more than a fraud.

For all the commotion that year, the dissent that shook the school only reached me in echoes. The day after Draco called her a Mudblood, for instance, Hermione was still bothered about the incident.

"The way they go on about it…" she began, then looked up and realized that I wore Slytherin colors. " I mean, not you, of course. I don't know why, but—"

I cut her off. "There's Muggleborn Slytherins, you know."

"I didn't realize… You wouldn't think…"

"They're very quiet. It worries me. One of them might bring a load of guns, one day, and shoot up the school."

"A gun wouldn't fire on Hogwarts grounds," she said compulsively.

I could only stare for a moment, struck literally dumb. I don't think I've ever seen someone miss the point so badly. Finally, I recovered.

"I know you're very smart, but that is probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

And it was, even coming form someone who was subject to Draco's endless insecure posturing.

Would a gun fire on Hogwarts grounds?

Nonetheless, I was curious enough to ask Snape when next I went to private lessons with him. He looked down at me with a hint of surprised dismay.

"That is not the matter at hand, Rookwood, as you well know."

The whole school was anxious and preoccupied. Everyone had heard of how History of Magic classes were being derailed by students wanting to know about the thought-to-be-mythical Chamber of Secrets, and stricter teachers, Snape among them, were developing a habit of keeping intensely close control over class discussions to prevent such mutinies.

So I was hardly surprised that his first impulse was to dismiss my inquiry. But a week later, he brought up the subject.

"The interaction between magic and Muggle technology is a complex and deeply layered subject. It is clear that there is some disturbance of technology by magic, and that the reverse is not also true. Professor Burbage, who teaches Muggle Studies, would be able to elaborate somewhat on what I have said. However, the truth is that very little academic investigation has been done on the subject."

He paused, partially as dramatic convention dictated and partially, I think, to decide whether or not to continue. Ultimately, his role as a teacher won out over his penchant for secrecy.

"You see, we do not actually understand what magic is or how it works. We cannot take it apart and glimpse the mechanism by which it works. We can only even circumscribe its boundaries by finding that which is invisible to the greater part of the world in all but its most concrete effects."

All of the other things I ascribe as being said by someone or other are guesses, pulled from memories that are less than perfect. But this is word for word. I copied it down exactly that night and wrote it inside the covers of all of my schoolbooks at the beginning of each year.

It is something we should have known. At the start of each year, instead of his idiomatic antics, Dumbledore should have stood before the Great Hall and told us, "You stand now at the edge of uncertainty. In the coming year, you will plunge into it." But no one ever told you.

I asked Snape, "Does it bother you?"

He turned his attention slightly away from me. "That is irrelevant."

We dropped that line of inquiry.

I did re-read my father's memoir. Many times, in fact, each more unremarkable than the last. Then, finally, I noticed it: a short string of letters near the middle that had no apparent meaning; a number of inconsistent spelling errors; the erratic spacing of a certain section. He could have done it perfectly, I think, but I might not have been able to find it. It was a code. Or rather, it was a whole mess of codes.

And then the purpose of my father's passed-on lessons became clear. He wanted me, and me alone, (for if there is any study less common to wizards than math, it is cryptology) to have the contents of this book. So I worked at it day and night, almost at severe detriment to my other studies.

All children really love their parents. All children want to be loved by their parents.

And I do think that my father loved me, even then. He was never good with kids; in others, he valued logic and capability above all else, and children are hardly logical or capable. But he tried, in many ways, to make me something to be proud of. And if it had come to it, I know he would have done anything to save me.