Story: Starting Over

Synopsis: Hermione and Ron's marriage fails after the miscarriage of their first child. Several months later she is given the chance to try and start over. Will she take it? Can a new love mend the pain of an old one, or are their some scars that never heal.

Rating: M

Pairing: Draco/Hermione

Beta Love: Thank you to my beautiful beta's, ErisAceso, oblivion . baby, & RooOJoy, for your time and love nurturing this story to a place where people might want to read it. You are extraordinary.

Disclaimer: I am not profiting from this story. Anything you recognize belongs to the great and mighty JKR.

Trigger Warning: Late term pregnancy loss

Chapter Seven : The Letters

The next few days were odd for Hermione Granger as she dreaded and awaited Saturday's arrival. After their statement was posted in The Daily Prophet, with an additional paragraph from the building's manager, she was able to walk at a normal pace again and found herself the target of fewer glares with each passing day. She even received an owl from Mrs. Weasley explaining that the elder woman personally sent an owl to Rita Skeeter letting her know exactly what she thought of her writing skills. She then went on to invite Hermione to dinner at the Burrow, stating that 'the whole family' would be there. Hermione tried to keep the Weasley's a large part of her life since her divorce, but she found that it was impossible to keep away from Ron and be part of his family when they were all together. Instead, she stopped in to see each member of the family at various times, usually at work or a dinner at their separate homes. The only time she saw Molly was when Ginny invited them both over for lunch at the same time.

Everything that happened after The Prophet posted the follow-up article would have been great news, except, she was worrying about her dinner date, and the fact that she lied to Harry and Ginny about seeing Draco Malfoy again. She promised them that their night had been a fluke, the result of alcohol and misery brought on by Ron's unexpected news, and that she would be immediately reverting back to her previous state of being indifferent towards Malfoy - as she rightly should. Several times during the week, she considered sending Malfoy an owl to let him know that she could not accept his offer of a dinner for that Saturday, but each time she sat down to write to him, she felt his breath on her skin or his hands in her hair, and found that she was unable to turn him down. Even when he wasn't there to argue his case, her body did it for him. She thought that it was more likely that she missed these things, being touched, held, and kissed, than she actually wanted to be with Malfoy. After all, under the Firewhiskey and the misery, she had still been shagging Malfoy, and there was something very wrong with that.

Wasn't there?

Nevertheless, each night before bed, she stood in front of her closet and stared at her clothes, with a frown on her lips. What did you wear to a muggle restaurant when you were attending with someone you once hated, but were now very attracted to? Honestly, she had no idea whether Malfoy even knew of any muggle restaurants. Obviously, his parents hadn't taken him to any when he was a child, and why would he have had any reason to venture into the world of the undesirables during adulthood? Certainly, he didn't think that any old muggle could cook better than a wizard. He would probably trick her into eating in his apartment and then take advantage of her again. Hermione always laughed at herself at this and went back to trying to write her letter, only to leave the parchment blank.

The long moments before bed were the worst. If she moved, her sheets felt like the tips of his fingers running across her leg. If she sighed, she could feel her heart beat a little faster in her chest and was reminded of how it raced when he kissed her neck. If she closed her eyes, she could see him over her, moving into her as she arched against him, moaning his name, his first name. The result of this was usually that she got out of bed and took a shower, where she could relieve herself of pent up frustrations and imagine how it would be when she and Malfoy were together again. Because, as much as it pained her to admit it, she wanted him again. She wanted him so much, that several times she had to stop herself from knocking on his door and requesting that he touch her body until she lost all sense of what was right or wrong.

Fortunately, Hermione had more common sense and self-control than that. She was able to keep herself in her own apartment at night, mainly because she tried very hard not to be there. Staying late at work or spending more time at Harry and Ginny's with her godsons occupied her time, and kept her mind off a certain blonde that was consuming every spare moment of each day.

When Saturday arrived, Hermione was more than ready to see him, but at the same time, she dreaded it. She was determined to make the best of her day and try not to think about her date unceasingly before it actually happened. She found this impossible as she was on her own for the entire day, since Ron was spending the day at Harry and Ginny's.

After she took a shower, she sat at her kitchen counter pushing an egg around her plate with a piece of toast. She found her thoughts drifting, and compared them to the time she had been scorned for supposedly breaking Harry's heart. Her memories of her burning hands and the hate mail she received in her fourth year left her with a similar feeling that she now got from the glares thrown her way over the thoughts of her adultery. These thoughts eventually gave way to thoughts of Ron years after they had started dating, revealing to her that he once thought Hermione was in love with Harry as well. She laughed it off at the time, but thinking back she wondered if he had been hurt by that as well. What if she hadn't realized just how much her actions hurt him? What if simple things like laughing off something that obviously bothered him when they were kids had been part of the reason they hadn't been able to survive the blow of losing Rose.

Suddenly, without warning or preconceived desire to see them, Hermione wanted to read his letters that lay unopened in her desk drawer. She found herself wondering what Ron said all those times he tried to reach her while she was hiding from him. She wanted nothing more than to be filled with her own misery and pain and live her life alone. Deciding that there was no time like the present, Hermione put her half eaten breakfast in the trash and her dishes in the sink. She wasn't sure why, but she thought that if she was going to really deal with what happened between her and Ron she was going to have to find out what he needed to say to her in letters he very well knew she wasn't reading. It took her less than five minutes to finish getting ready and head out the door, bringing with her a bundle of nerves and anxiety.

The Ministry was bustling even on the weekends, and this Saturday was no exception. She smiled and waved at a few acquaintances, but her need to get to her office was much greater than her desire to be polite and stop to chat. Her assistant's desk was empty when she reached it, so she pushed the door to her office open, only to close it quickly behind her, and move to her desk without a second thought about what she was getting herself into. She pulled the bottom drawer of the right side open as soon as she took a seat on the floor next to it.

The letters sat there, waiting for someone to open them, to read the secret feelings of her ex-husband. Waiting to help her move on, or to help her destroy the progress she made over the last year. Now that she sat before them, it was easy to remember why she stuck them in here in the first place, fear. A fear that maybe Ron was the only man she would ever love as fiercely and easily as she once had. A fear that each letter would reopen the pain that she felt after she first left him. A memory of her standing sideways in front of the mirror, tears rolling down her face as she tried to remember the shape of her body when it had been swelled with their child. Another memory of Ron whispering to her stomach as they got ready for bed moved to replace the last. Ron's face when she told him that they were going to be parents topped them all, and the joy that he shared with her when they told their families and friends. Not for the first time, Hermione wondered if she had given up on her marriage too soon, left Ron for her own reasons, instead of for the right reasons. Maybe they had been strong enough, but she had not given them the chance to be. Maybe it was all her fault that all she had left from that time was a stack of letters in her desk drawer.

Hermione covered her face with her hands and started to breathe deeply to clear her head. Once she focused her thoughts again on the drawer in front of her, she moved her hands to grab the stack and pulled the very bottom letter from the rest. The side of the seal was still torn from when she started to open it the day Harry gave it to her. She had stopped herself before she could finish opening it and stuck it in the drawer instead, where it had stayed until this day. She waited another moment, knowing that as soon as the seal on the first letter was broken she wouldn't be able to stop reading. She ran her finger under the wax, tearing the parchment under it a little as she fumbled with her shaking hands. Her eyes absorbed the words almost all at once, and she had to force herself to read slow enough that she could understand what the letter said.

Hermione –

I need you to know that I don't understand why you are gone. Harry says it's just that you need time, but I think it's more. I think I know you well enough to know that now that you've left, you aren't coming back to me. I was standing in Rose's room today, holding her blanket, the one you got to bring her home in, and it hit me that this is my fault. I wanted so badly for things to be right again that I couldn't admit that everything between us was going horribly wrong. I don't know what I'm going to do without you here to make sure that the world isn't crashing in around us. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and reach for you, but the bed is empty beside me. Then I remember that everything is so wrong and all I want to do is find you and let you know that everything that has ever mattered to me is empty without you. I love you so much, Hermione. I think I just need to know that you know that.

Ron

His words were so simple, so utterly Ron, that she knew he had scribbled them down in haste and hadn't bothered to think about it before sending it to her. Her tears stained his writing as she reread the short note, and a pain that rivaled the worst she had ever felt exploded in her heart. The thought of him reaching for her, as he had so many times when they were married, pushed her to admit that she missed these small things about being with him. She missed waking up next to someone who cared about her. She missed having someone who knew her so well that there was hardly a reason for her to explain herself. She missed that he used to make her breakfast in the morning. She missed soft kisses and having someone hold her as she read her favorite book. She even missed fighting with him about the stupidest things imaginable. She missed laughing at his jokes, but most of all, more than any of these things, she missed being sure that someone loved her more than they loved anyone else in the entire world.

After the first one, the letters were longer and more planned out. She imagined Ron sitting at his desk in their apartment, biting the end of a quill, searching for the right way to tell her the things he wanted her to know. He told her about his family. He shared their news with them and updated her on their insane lives. Hermione knew all of this from speaking to them, but it was nice to know that he had wanted her to feel included, to still know what was going on with the people who she considered family for over ten years. Every once in awhile, he would write about a certain memory of them that had been stuck in his head, or something about Rose.

She found that he had written a letter dedicated entirely to Rose on the anniversary of the day they had lost her. Hermione read the words, which spoke of what he wanted for their daughter, with careful scrutiny and tried to keep her eyes from clouding as each word burned its way into her memory. He started by talking about nights they had never been woken by the cry of a beautiful girl from the nursery, and moved on to how everyone would have fawned over their beautiful girl. He then guessed that she would have made mischief with James, but never would have been caught, because she would have inherited her mother's brilliance. Next was her first trip to Hogwarts. They would take her to Platform 9 ¾ and he would have wanted to pick her up and take her back home and never let her leave the house so that she would always be safe, always be their little girl. But, she would have gone to school and used that brilliance and sneaky nature to stay at the top of the class, and one day they would have been awoken by her screaming because she had made head girl, and then Hermione would have started screaming and the two of them would have driven Ron to hide from their excited shrieks in the safety of a broom cupboard. Next, he spoke of the undeniable fact that Hermione's brilliant girl would have no doubt climbed the ladder of the Ministry and become the youngest Minister of Magic in a hundred years. And then, after she had a solid career she would have married some other genius, and given them a pair of the most beautiful grandchildren ever known. And, they through all of this, would have been happy and loved their daughter with a ferocity challenged only by their love of each other.

After she read this, Hermione clutched it to her chest and laid on her side on the floor of her office. As she stared at her desk, lost in her thoughts, her vision blurred with more of her tears. Her sobs shook her body. Ron was moving on. He was happy again, or so she hoped, even if it was with Lavender. He was having another baby, and she was lying on her office floor sobbing into the carpet. It hurt to think about how happy she had been before all of it. She loved their life. She had loved him, but after Rose, something inside of her broke, and it had been broken for a long time. She hadn't even realized she was living her life on autopilot until this moment, here on the floor, as she thought about what she really wanted out of her life.

She didn't really think Malfoy would end up being her forever, but he'd made her feel things that she hadn't felt in so long. She had forgotten that emotions outside of numb existed. He made her want something again, really want it, in a way that made her crazy. She wanted him. She didn't know what that meant or honestly how insane it was, but she knew it was true. She needed to feel alive again, and he was the person that seemed most able to help her do that. She stayed there like that, lying on the floor, crying, waffling between thoughts of the past and the future for so long that she fell asleep.

XXX

A/N: Thank you for reading and reviewing ! I love reading them and I appreciate it!

I hope that you enjoy this chapter and I'm sorry it is a little later in the day than normal. I'm dealing with a migraine and kind of forgot it was Thursday.

XOXO

Meg