Author's Note

AO3 Tags: Infidelity, Obliviation, Memory Alteration, Secrets, Anxiety, Depression, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Slow Build, Slow Burn

Welcome to what I've dubbed my giant angst bomb. This story has been in the works for a little under a year, and it's tried my patience so many times.

Here are the warnings: There will be light Draco/Astoria smut, Hermione will have a relationship (both emotional and sexual - with full explicit smut) with another character to be tagged later. There will be four POVs, but I will try not change in the middle of a chapter. If I happen to, I will make it very clear! I actually hate everyone in this story at one point or another so I am assuming readers will, too. I am okay with that. Tell me your feelings! Also, feel free to reach out to me on social media if you have questions about any of the tags and I will give you as much or as little information as you want. I don't want to trigger anyone.

When I say slow burn, I mean slooooooow. I know this is something new and different for me, but I have a ton of building to do before we get there. I am asking you all to trust me! It'll be a very long journey (thinking at least 250k - I have over 100k written), but I've been told this story is pretty good! *wink* You can expect future chapters to be between 2500 and 7000 words, posting on Saturdays. I have a buffer of ~20 chapters already completed.

I need to thank so many people - smithandbarrowman, coyg_81, TriDogMom, BreathOfThePhoenix, LaBelladoneX for a ton of combined Alpha/Beta work. TriDogMom was the first one to look at this story and she's read parts in third person, first person, past tense, present tense. You name it, I did it before deciding!

Also, a blanket thanks to Sanctum of (in)Sanity for hosting so many wonderful events for both NaNo and the upcoming Camp NaNo. If you're writing and struggling with anything, you should jump in that group. There are so many talented authors that will jump to help you as soon as you ask! I definitely chatted through details for this story with a bunch of people and they talked me off the ledge after NaNo!

"Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason.

Take a man's memories and you take all of him."

- Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns (The Broken Empire, #2)

Astoria — October 2005

I'd been living in hell for nearly a year.

That was how long I'd known about my husband's affair. When I told him I was pregnant, I thought it would all stop, that he would give her up to focus on our growing family. He had to, right?

Wrong.

Instead of being happy and celebrating with me, he fled the Manor and ran to her. I shouldn't have been shocked, but I was. When Draco stormed away I immediately broke down, losing myself to the tears I normally kept at bay while I foolishly waited for him to return.

An hour passed and he didn't come back. At this point, my sadness morphed into blind anger, both at myself and at him. I was furious that I meant nothing to him, that the baby growing inside of me, his heir, was also less important than her .

I was so upset that night that I made a snap decision to tell his father — a decision that has now come back to haunt me.

I sat in the Manor waiting for Hermione Granger, the woman whom my husband was in love with, to finish Obliviating him. She was erasing their relationship from his memory and altering Draco's memories of me so he would think he and I had always been in love.

The woman that Draco actually loved was transferring the feelings he had for her to me, and that wasn't what I wanted at all. I wanted him to choose me — to choose our family — over her. I should've known that I'd never be able to compete with the Brightest Witch of Her Age, the forbidden fruit that had dangled in front of Draco for over ten years. Why would he want the wife his parents had arranged for him when he could have her?

I wasn't as smart as her. Or as famous. Or as innocent and bookish, something that most men seemed to find intriguing when it came to her specifically. They wanted to know if she was quiet and subdued in bed or hiding a wild side. With a girl like Hermione, no one could just believe that she'd have average, run-of-the-mill sex. No, she would either be a prude to be joked about or a hellcat to brag about.

I waited for three days, hoping that she wouldn't kill Draco or turn him into a vegetable by fiddling around inside his brain. Lucius, of course, had hired a specialized, discreet Healer to oversee the process. Even if Hermione was the most brilliant witch of our generation, she didn't have Healer training. To add insult to injury, I had to let her dig through my memories and fantasies, giving her things she could plant in Draco's mind. How had Lucius put it? Draco would need something to help him remember his darling, affectionate wife. He had to remember how he'd felt when I told him I was pregnant. I wanted to laugh at the thought. Thank Merlin I'd played half a dozen scenarios out in my head before actually telling him; I was able to show one of those to Hermione, and she had said it was detailed enough that it could work.

Then she looked at me, her eyes filled with guilt and pity. I was pitied by someone that I had been taught to hate, a witch I had been told over and over again was beneath me because of her birth.

If she was really beneath me, how had she come out on top over and over again?

After she left the Manor, I sat at Draco's bedside, waiting for him to wake up. The Healer informed us that it would likely take days or maybe even weeks. It didn't matter. For all of this to work, I had to be the first person he saw when he woke up. I had to be the one who greeted him with a relieved smile and a kiss, to tell him about his flying accident and subsequent brain injury. I had to tell him about our life and about our baby.

I had to lie through my teeth over and over again and hope he believed me.

I had to hope that Hermione fucking Granger was truly gone from his brain and his heart.