The meeting goes off without a hitch. Hermione's coworkers all approve of the bill, and apart from a few minor semantic changes, they all decide it's ready to go. Fortunately, it's a few days before the deadline for lodging bills for the next sitting of the Wizengamot, so she finalises the document and lodges it before returning home.

When she enters Grimmauld Place, she hears the sound of light footsteps coming from the direction of the library. Smiling, she hurries forward. Fred left when she did that morning, but he has the day off. He must have come back to surprise her.

But when she steps into the library, Fred isn't the person she sees — it's Luna. She has an odd contraption in her hand and seems to be scanning the room with it.

'How long have you been here?' Hermione asks, surprised.

She doesn't mind; they told Luna she's welcome to come by any time, and they meant it. Still, it's startling to see someone in her home when she has only just resigned herself to being there alone.

'I don't know. I didn't check the time when I arrived. It hasn't felt like long, though.'

'Oh. Are you hungry? I can make us some lunch.'

'That would be lovely.'

Walking downstairs to the kitchen, Hermione starts to get out the ingredients for sandwiches. 'How did the trip go?'

'Fairly well. I found most of the creatures we were looking for. A few of them are very shy, so I only caught glimpses, but I have a lot of new data for my research.'

Something about Luna's word strikes Hermione as odd, but she can't quite put her finger on it. 'That's great. How's Rolf, by the way? He isn't here with you?'

'No, we aren't seeing one another anymore.' Luna frowns. 'I always wondered about that phrase, but I get it now.'

Hermione hesitates before starting to cut up the vegetables. 'I'm so sorry. What happened?'

'We found a Snorkack,' she says. 'I wanted to observe him, take a few photographs, and leave him in peace. They're so rare; what if he's part of a mating pair? It wouldn't be fair to take him out of his environment and away from his family. But Rolf disagreed. He thought the only way the general public would believe that we'd found him was to take him with us, and he didn't care that it would be hurting the Snorkack.

'We fought. Then, when he went to fetch the equipment to catch him, I told the Snorkack to go. We've always had different approaches to our work, but we couldn't work through this one, and I didn't like what it said about him.

'That was in the first few weeks of the trip. We split up for the rest of it.'

With that, the pieces fit together — it was the choice of pronoun that Hermione noticed earlier; Luna isn't the sort to take credit for someone else's work, but since she genuinely ended up as the sole researcher, it makes sense.

'That must have been tough.'

'It was at first. It felt like everything was ending. But the thing I most wanted to do was the thing I was already doing, so I just kept going. Over time, I felt lighter. Rolf is a kind man, but he was more of a hindrance than a help at work; he isn't very good at stealth. And I felt happier.'

'Well,' Hermione says, 'now that the bill has been lodged, I'll be back to working normal hours for a while. Do you want to do something together this weekend?'