Disclaimer: If I were JKR, I wouldn't be barely scraping by to pay for my college tuition. Unfortunately, scraping is occurring. Therefore, I can't possibly be JKR. Whoa, that deductive reasoning was brilliant! I is a genius!

A/N: Now we get to return to Draco and finally get some answers! A titanic thank you and giant bear hug to all of my readers and reviewers! You made my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week a little brighter.

Now, want to tell me what you think about this plot twist? =D

"What? Mum, what do you mean?" I inquired, completely taken aback to hear those words from her lips.

"I…" Her eyes slipped closed for a moment, reopening with a distinctive sheen. "I've thought about telling you… but I just didn't know how. I was so ashamed, so worried about what Lu—what your father might do…"

"Just tell me," I urged, desperately wanting to know what my mother was hiding from me, what she had been hiding from my father.

"I… I don't know if I should," she murmured, gazing at me with gentle eyes layered in pain.

"Mum, what is it?" I demanded, feeling a spark of anger – probably the most emotion I had managed to stir up since we left on this insane trip. As I tried to figure out what was going on, a thought struck me. "Are you cheating on Dad?"

"No!" she protested earnestly, shaking her head repeatedly, eyes wide with anxiety. "I could never do that. I loved your dad, I really did." The unspoken difference between my father and the man we were running from hung in the air around us, brought into the room by her slip. Quickly, she corrected herself under her breath, mumbling, "I meant, do. I still do."

"Then what other person did he find out about?" I questioned, not understanding anything at all any more. Staring directly at me, she stayed silent for a long stretch of time.

"Your… my daughter," she whispered at last, seeming so small and afraid, like a mouse caught in a corner by a big, fat, grinning house cat. Although I would have sworn that I couldn't have been more confused, those two words spun my world off its axis.

"Your… daughter?" I echoed stupidly, blinking over and over and over in an effort to… what? Speed my brain up? Force the world to make sense again? I had no idea. I didn't know anything in that moment. "I have a sister?"

"Half-sister," she corrected shamefully, eyes clouded over with disappointment, worry, and regret – a mixture that only added to the boggling of my mind.

"Half… but you said…" I began, trying to fit together the pieces. If this girl was supposedly my half-sister and my mother's daughter, we must have different fathers. But she had just said she was faithful to my dad, so how…

"I was raped," my mother admitted softly, gaze dropping to the fabric of the couch cushion we leant against. From her tone alone, I could tell she still hated the subject, was haunted by it. She spoke so quietly, it seemed to almost be nothing more than a whistle of the wind. Perhaps the words were too heavy, too difficult, too depressing to release into the world any louder. After all, hearing them at that small volume blew me away. Thousands of questions crowded my brain, but I couldn't think and everything froze, my mouth open slightly in its speechlessness.

"It was a couple of years after the first war," she continued, voice retaining its emotion, but earning the hollow, empty echo that accompanies the reporting of past terrors. "Maybe not even that long. You were young though, too young to remember."

A pause filled the room as she slipped her eyes closed. When they opened again, they seemed to focus on something very far away, not in the room, not even in this world. "He blamed your father for what happened to his children. He was upset that your father hadn't gone to Azkaban. He thought our family needed to be punished properly, and since the authorities hadn't, he decided to take matters into his own hands.

"I had been out shopping in London. He must have been following me. As I took out my wand to Apparate back to the Manor, he jumped out and took it from my hands. We struggled. He was stronger. I tried to find my wand, but I had gone down a dark alley to avoid being seen doing magic. Everything happened so fast, but time went by so slowly. He seemed to have me captured for a long time in my mind.

"I was… lucky. I had been running late as it was, so your father got worried. He came looking for me. He found that… he found me in the alley, being attacked, and he killed my rapist instantly." Mum closed her eyes again, no doubt flashing back to the scene that she painted. Even with the limited tools of my imagination, I was horrified. I had heard stories about girls getting… violated, but older women, too? And my own mother?

"So much was going on," she mumbled, eyelids still blocking out the real world as she drifted into her memories. "We kept it a secret. All of it. The rape, the killing… the child." At this point, a collection of water skimmed the bottom of my mother's eyelashes, threatening to stain her cheeks. "Lu—your father didn't want the baby, of course. I didn't want it. It was… a painful reminder of the… attack. And it was half him," she spat, venom and anger and resentment suddenly and completely taking over her voice. Then she sighed heavily, resting her head against the crook of her arm, leaning against the back of the couch.

"But it was also half me, so we couldn't just… I couldn't just get rid of it." She bit her lip, silently nodding her head, as if reassuring herself about some question that had been lingering in her mind for a long time. I wondered how much longer she would be burdened by this secret I didn't even realize she had been carrying around. "We… I made plans to leave it with someone else, have someone else raise it. Lu—your father never wanted to see or mention it again."

"But if Dad knew, then why is it such a big deal that he found out about her? What could he have found out?" I questioned, not understanding how all these new puzzle pieces fit together into the picture I was striving to construct.

"Because… because Luci—because he wanted to get rid of it," she admitted, a tear spilling into the cavity next to her eye. "He told me to bring it to term and have the baby someplace else, somewhere he didn't have to look at me or see me give birth. So I came here, to this town, and stayed in this little place, where no wizard or witch could ever find me. We wouldn't want them to find out, after all," she exclaimed darkly. "But when the time came… I couldn't do it," she confessed, voice breaking. Lifting her head, she opened her eyes and looked directly at me.

"I couldn't kill my baby," she sobbed, broken and fragile. How could something be fragile but already broken at the same time? But she was, she was. The pieces of her that remained, those that were already broken, were so fragile that I thought she would shatter right before my very eyes. How could I not have seen this? All my life, my mother, the woman that raised me…

"I should have, but I couldn't," she murmured, over and over, steady sobs seeming somehow… controlled, quieter than they should be, like she had practiced keeping these emotional outbursts to herself. "I couldn't kill my baby, my little girl. Even though she was… dirty, repulsive… but so small, so beautiful…"

"Mum…"

The word barely scraped past my throat, which seemed swollen and heavy and thick and worthless at the moment. Even if I had been able to speak, all words flew out of my head, like I never learned a single language. Everything was just… blank. But not pure. Not blank like an empty piece of parchment, waiting to be written on and filled and given life; blank like a wall covered in black paint, all signs of previous life hidden from view, leaving only a dark void in its place.

I don't even remember reaching forward, or pulling my mother into my embrace as if she was the child among us. I don't recall the moment she turned to me and let her arms wrap around my shoulders, or the second when tears first tracked down my face. But the sound of her steady sobs getting louder and irregular as a wetness stained a spot on my shoulder, the shaking of her worn and fragile body as it trembled… I remember that.

Grief swept over me, dragging down my eyelids, pulling me into a world without light, a world with only the sound of her crying, the touch of her warm grip that should have offered comfort instead of demanding it, the taste of my own tears – tears shed for a suffering mother who had kept her pain hidden for so long, for a father who was dead in every sense of the word but physically, for an unknown and mysterious sister, and maybe – just maybe – a few for a girl I had to leave behind.

Time passed without either of us caring. Eventually my mother's sobs calmed into shudders and gasps, which in turn slowed into deep breaths as she slipped into sleep. Gently extracting myself from her embrace, I laid her down on the couch and grudgingly dragged my feet around the small cottage. Aimlessly, I wandered down the hall into the cramped kitchen, observing the square, wooden table barely suitable for four occupants, dirty cupboards, rusting sink, yellowing refrigerator with an unemotional eye, not even bothering to check if there was food hidden away behind any of the concealed spaces.

Turning back into the hall, I prodded open the next door I came across, discovering a tiny bathroom covered with enough filth for half a dozen rooms twice its size. However, my bizarrely apathetic temperament at the time didn't call for a nose wrinkling or disgusted scowl, like such a site usually would earn. Instead I merely cast a glance around and shut the door again before moving on to the room across the hall.

Like everything else in this cabin, the bedroom was small and looked like it hadn't seen human life in months. But only months; not years or even decades. According to my mother, she had been here when she gave birth to my… sister, and that was a couple years after the war.

I would have been a toddler. Surely I would have noticed my mother's absence. Why didn't I remember her not being there? Was I too young? Would I have remembered age three if I been there to experience the birth of my baby sister?

Closing my eyes, I tried to imagine my life redrawn to fit in another child. I had always wanted a brother or sister (okay, a brother mostly, but a sister would have been better than no one) when I was little, but as I grew older, I liked not having to share my toys, space, parents. Imagining a blonde little girl running down the halls of the Manor with a fancy dollie in one hand, being chased and teased by her big brother (who was supposed to be me, I guess), the scene seemed so unreal that it melted away faster than an ice cube on a hot summer day. I just couldn't see it.

In all honestly, I probably was still in denial. I probably would stay there until I actually met the girl, maybe for even longer than that.

Blinking my eyes several times, I concentrated on the bedroom in front of me. A single bed took up most of the space, with a narrow wardrobe and miniature set of drawers on either side. Blank, off-white boards sandwiched the beige comforter and matching pillows settled at the head of the bed. Slowly walking towards it, I sat down on the old mattress, sending a soft creak through the room. Giving in to the temptation to collapse backwards, I let my arms land arbitrarily at my sides, my lower legs dangling off the edge of the bed carelessly.

How long would I be here? What exactly did Mum want to accomplish by coming here? Would we be taking my mysterious sister away with us? Where would we be going next? Did my sister even know she was my sister?

With all of these questions spinning through my head, I groaned and rolled onto my side, staring at the set of drawers just beyond my reach. Curiosity swept over me, bidding my hand to stretch out and grasp the peg handle. After opening the drawer, I half-crawled my way across the small bed before flipping my legs over the edge to peer inside.

To tell the truth, I was expecting it to be empty. To my surprise, within the drawer sat a brown book, not big or intimidating enough to be an informational text, not small or colorful enough to be a paperback novel, it looked like a journal. Apprehensively, I reached into the drawer and pulled the book out. The leather cover revealed its obvious age, bent spine and worn pages reporting how often its owner would flip through its contents. Just as my fingers moved to open the front cover, I froze. If this was my mother's journal that she kept while staying in this cabin – as I suspected it was – would she want me to read it? Would she want anyone to read it? Doubt nibbled on my brain, alongside the promise of future guilt if I acted on my curiosity.

Then I noticed a corner of a piece of paper sticking out of the bottom of the book. Tilting my head to the side, I slipped it out from in between the pages. Instantly, all my attention focused on the piece of paper, or rather, on the picture on that piece of paper.

The image depicted a tiny baby girl, dressed in a simple yellow dress. Her dark brown hair barely reached her forehead, but slight curls around her ears predicted at least wavy hair in her future years. Since she was sleeping, I couldn't see what color her eyes were, but I remember someone telling me once that most baby's eyes were blue when they were first born anyway. She did, however, have the thinnest pink lips I'd ever seen, accompanied by a delicate nose. Above everything else, it was the way her tiny fingers curled around the finger of the woman holding her that made her seem so sweet and innocent. I didn't need to look at the woman holding her to know that it would be my mother.

And this was my sister.

I was surprised to note that her hair was, in fact, brown and not blonde. I had assumed, of course, since my parents and I all had naturally blond hair. But then again, the baby girl was only partly my sister.

Without my permission, my fingers reached out to lightly touch the cheeks of this baby that was so small, so innocent, so dependant. How could anyone ever leave her?

Closing my eyes, I took in a deep breath and flipped the image upside down, planning on placing it back inside the journal, attempting to forget about it, and fall asleep on the bed.

However, when I opened my eyes again, the back of the paper also caught my eye. There was something there. Something written in ink.

Pavo Rachelle

Murmuring the words aloud, I immediately realized it was a name – her name. The name of my sister.

Gingerly, I set the book on top of the chest of drawers, leaving the handwritten declaration of my sister's name openly facing the room. Laying back down, I let my gaze drift to the ceiling before slipping them shut, blocking off all sight.

Right when I approached the edge of sleep, I sat up, reached for the picture, and flipped it back over to reveal the image of the little baby, warm and comforted in her mother's loving arms. As I returned my head to the pillow beneath it, the image flashed before my mind one final time.

Only then did I notice the tear stains running down my mo— our mother's face as she held her little girl.