The rest of the day spent with the Grangers was strangely relaxing. While I loved the Weasleys, they were a lot. The doctors Granger were much more relaxed: parental, without being aggressive about it.

And they had a TV, a VCR, and tapes of several of the movies I'd missed over the last few years.

Of course, I had to sit on the opposite side of the room and keep my magic contained so I wouldn't burn the electronics out. Hermione's power leakage wasn't nearly as bad as mine, but even she had also been exiled to the furthest couch. Apparently the last two TVs had failed dramatically when she forgot and tried to watch up close.

Tonks showed up that evening to take my statement. She was nice enough to bring the change of clothes I'd left in my room at the Three Broomsticks that I hadn't been able to use the previous night. Her hair subtly flickering from light to dark pink with what I assumed was amusement as I finished explaining my story, she just shook her head and said, "I think Moody's going to ask you to marry him or something."

"What?" I boggled.

"We walked the crime scene earlier, and could corroborate a lot of what you just told me," she explained. "The old man was impressed. You got ambushed in the open by three vampires—one of whom is a dark witch—and Black, got away, and managed to take one of them out and wound another. He was just chuckling and saying 'Ha! Constant vigilance!' every time we worked out a different stage of what had happened."

"And the way I took out that vampire…"

"You probably shouldn't make fiendfyre your go-to or anything, but Moody says he might have tried the same thing in that situation. If you'd burned down Hogsmeade, it would have been a problem," she grinned. "Well, unless you just got the Hog's Head."

"Mavra was at the Malfoy party. Talking to the Minister. He didn't seem to know who she was," I remembered.

"Egypt and Gringotts are both really bad about sharing information," Tonks admitted. "But now she's committed a crime here. Well, honestly," she shrugged, "if she'd just tried to kill you, who knows whether the Ministry would care, but they take tampering with the floo seriously, and I think we can sell that she's helping Black."

"Shouldn't you be much deeper into your career before you get that cynical?" I shook my head.

"I knew more or less what I was getting into. And Moody had no interest in leaving any of my illusions intact." She sighed, her hair fading to a much darker pink. "But if the good aurors give up on justice, then that just lets the corrupt ones stay in charge of everything. By the way," she changed the subject, "was my aunt at the Malfoy party this year?"

"Ask Mathilda," I confirmed, as much as I was able.

She nodded, "Figured." I was glad that the revelation of my relationship with her insane aunt hadn't ruined my friendship with Tonks. She was good people.

Speaking of Mathilda, she didn't actually decide to murder me for nearly getting killed when we met up on the train the next day, but she was pretty upset once I finished explaining what happened. "Harry! Why does this keep happening to you? You got jumped in the floo!"

The rest of my friends' reactions were pretty similar, as I told the story multiple times on the train ride back to Hogwarts. Even Ron, Seamus, and Colin, though they clearly thought it was an exciting story, seemed to realize how much danger I'd been in. I could tell because their usual reckless Gryffindor rambunctiousness was very muted. They didn't even say, "Wicked!" even once.

And then, after a few hours' peace on the train, I got called up to Dumbledore's office to tell the story again.

McGonagall had sat in on the recounting, and it had been tense. I guess she'd picked up on it, and as she walked me back to Gryffindor after hours, she asked, "What's up, Hoss?"

After a brief inclination to play it off, I decided why not do it then? I wasn't going to get less anxious about the conversation over time. "Rita Skeeter ambushed me with family history before the party," I led in. "Wanted to know if I'd talked to my grandmother about my parents. Since she was so available to me."

Her step hitched and she quietly huffed, "Damn that woman," before visibly steeling herself and asking, "My office?"

"Sure," I shrugged. No sense having this out in the relative public of the mostly-empty halls. Though I guess I would have welcomed Filch and Mrs. Norris showing up to provide emotional support.

We detoured to her office and she offered the guest chair, before slumping down at her desk. She glanced consideringly down at a desk drawer, and I assumed there was liquor in there, before she shook her head slightly on the realization that it was a school night. Instead, she folded her hands together and placed them on the surface of the desk, beginning, "I've been trying to find the right time to tell you for over two years…"

"Ma'am. With all respect. The right time was the first time we met in the infirmary," I chided her. I was suddenly struck by the memory of Madam Pomfrey sadly regarding the two of us. She must have known the whole time. Probably the whole staff knew, or at least every one of them that had been teaching when my mother was a student.

"I know… I… I'm sorry Harry," she finally got out. "You deserved better. I should be better. Gryffindor courage is no match for fears about family."

"Why were you afraid?" I asked. I needed to know. I didn't buy that it was just a courage issue.

"With your mother—with Margaret—I never managed to balance my role as a teacher with my role as a mother. I felt that I couldn't show her preferential treatment, and I wound up pushing her away. I thought that if you knew that I was your grandmother but you still had to treat me as your professor, it would have the same effect."

I thought about that for a second, then got out, "Again, with all respect… I think that's bullshit." That cracked a look of shock through her stoic facade. "Plenty of kids have their parents as teachers. Any teacher at a public school that's ever had a kid. Homeschooled families. Everyone in history that ever taught their kids to do the family business."

She just nodded, thinking about it, admitting, "It seemed to make sense. That's when I began to notice the problem."

"How did you take her getting sorted into Slytherin?"

"Not… well."

"And before that?" I wondered. I had enough of the pieces now that I could put them together to make a shape. "Did you live in the castle with her or did you move here after she left? Did you have any time for her before she got to Hogwarts? Did she know that you had to give up your original career to take care of her? Maybe what you saw at school was just her finally getting friends to give her context that made her think you didn't love her."

All of that was sinking in. I didn't want to make an old woman cry, but it was all coming out.

And then I had the thought and ground out, "Wait. Did you know about me? Did you let me sit in an orphanage for years?"

"No!" she insisted. "She never told me. I only knew she died from rumors and inability to send her messages. And then one day your name showed up in the book of new students. It includes parents' names for legacy students. I couldn't believe it. But when we got to the orphanage, you were already gone. We searched for you with every moment for a year, and had the Order on the lookout for clues afterward. That's how Kingsley knew to call us the moment you were arrested. That was the first news we'd had of you in years."

Now it was my turn to think. I had never exactly been hiding. But I didn't know the steps Justin had taken to obscure my trail. For all I knew, he could have used some variation of the fidelius that broke when he died. More likely, even though I hadn't moved far from the orphanage, British wizards would have no idea how to track down a kid in a big city in muggle America unless I'd made national news.

While I was finishing that thought, she got out, "I'm still that scared teenager with a baby on the way, inside. Maybe if you'd come to me after your father died I would have gotten it right. But there you were, nearly fully-grown, coming out of a tragedy greater than most adults have ever suffered, a complete stranger for me to figure out… and I panicked. I put on my educator face and just treated you like any other student until I could figure it out. And I kept putting it off."

If that first day at Hogwarts she'd greeted me with how glad she was to have finally found me… that after that nightmare, at least I'd finally been found by family… it might have changed everything. "It would have been the right time," I repeated.

"I'm sorry, Harry," she told me again. I could tell she meant it, but an apology wasn't getting two and a half years of having a family back.

Neither was being hurt and refusing to forgive her, remaining permanently estranged. But I wasn't ready quite yet. "I wish I'd heard it from you and not from a reporter," I said. "The longer you waited, the less chance there would have ever been a time that made sense. You may have never told me. I… I need some time."

She just nodded sadly as I got up and left.