Dearest Ferret,

I've started to wonder if you're avoiding me, but that can't be so, can it? If nothing else, we've always been honest to each other. Even - one might say - brutally so, at times. I've been home six times since February, Malfoy, and I've seen neither hide nor hair of you. I shudder to write this, but did I do something? Did I upset you somehow?

The piano is fixed. I know you used to play, you told me after I found that box of photos in the North Wing. I think I'd like to hear it sometime, if you ever come home.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I miss you. I want you to come home. I want you.

She flung the ninth parchment she'd tried to write in the fireplace to burn. A cigarette smoldered forgotten in an ashtray beside her, even though she knows he hates smoking in the house. It wasn't like he was there to berate her, anyway.

The letters start out fine, she thinks, but somewhere along the second line or so she gets tripped up. If there is one thing Ginny fears more than a possessed diary, it is to be seen as needy, and there seems to be something undeniably desperate about asking her co-worker or landlord or whatever he was to come home because she misses him.

But then, he'd always been more to her than her fellow Hogwarts alum or her flat-mate or even just her friend. There had always been something underlying their relationship, something she used to define as hate or dislike or her utter disregard for him, but none of those things were right anymore, either.

It was entirely likely that something had changed when she'd fallen asleep on him. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that he had seen her getting herself off and that changed things, though she didn't know why that should be so. From what she knew of her brothers, men were practically born with a death grip on their willies. Why should it be so different for her? It wasn't as if he could have possibly seen anything.

Certain if she could just put the right words down on parchment that her feelings would suddenly be made clear, she tried to do just that.

In the end she sent:

Draco,

I'm thinking of tearing out the mosaic flooring in that bathroom on the third floor of the East Wing. What do you think? I'll be in Beijing next week- I know you're somewhere in China too, so maybe we could meet for a meal or something to discuss things.

-G

PS. If I don't hear from you in a week, I'll ask your darling Mother to give you her opinion about the matter. Don't think I won't just because she scares the living daylights out of me.

Remembering Draco's many lectures about that room's supposedly marvelous tile work (though in her opinion the whole room was grotty and needed to be made new again), she knew he'd respond at very least.

It was strange, this indefinable ache in her chest- it had been so long since she'd heard his snark, his laugh, that sniff he made when he thought something was preposterous, not to mention the way he would say preposterous in that posh, snooty tone of his, as if his nose was a mile in the air.

And she, Ginny Weasley, was bloody insane.