I could tell you all the wonderful things about my childhood at the Burrow.

How having so many brothers means someone is always on your side.

I could tell you how my mother doted on me, hung me from the sky like a star.

I could tell you that having a father who loves Muggle things is interesting.

Or how Harry Potter was my hero for all the right reasons.

But I could also tell you how lonely it was, being the only girl in a house of men.

Being the focus of a mother who resented her place in life.

There is love, there must be love, in a house so full of people.

But there also has to be control, gripped tightly.

And Molly—Mum—controlled everything with an iron fist and spells that put eyes in the walls.

I don't remember the first time it hurt. I started my period early, probably eight or nine years old. The pain didn't start until I was twelve.

It was sentient. The Dragon. I gave it a name. It felt like it knew, something, anything… and it felt personal.

It creeped up my spine like a ghost in the hallway.

I would lay there, listening to the blood pound my ears for hours.

The first few years I cried. I really did. I thought, stupidly, that someone could fix it. I had seen people levitate houses… disappear in fireplaces… speak to the dead. Why couldn't they fix this wrong, wrong, wrong thing in my belly?

I remember one day, it rolled through me, thunder under my ribs and sour in my throat. My jaw ached and my lungs clenched.

The bathroom was cool. The heat was in my belly. But the bathroom was cool.

I heard her footsteps coming up the narrow hallway. I called out her name. "Mum."

She always pounded. Like we were too stupid to know what a timeline was.

"We need to go, Ginevra!"

I would never be able to vocalize what the pounding did to my body.

It would be years before I could tell anyone how it damaged me. How it made me feel—anxious. I used to think it belonged to the war, that trauma. But it was in my nervous system long before I saw anyone die.

"I do—can't."

My throat burned. I can taste it even now. The snake slide of vomit up my throat, out from between my teeth. How it tasted. Can't have oatmeal now, because that is how—the texture really. It has a texture, those years, that pain.

I remember how it felt to try to stand up and feel the hard clumps in my red hair.

Mum. Mum didn't care. She opened the door with practiced ease and looked down at me.

"You're sick?"

"I threw up."

"Oh. Okay. We can fix this."

The same charms, the ones I called the Fixing.

Vomit gone.

Hair fixed.

Nausea controlled.

Teeth bright and white.

Clothing straightened.

And still, no kindness behind those eyes.

"Did you do this on purpose?" Mum always used to ask that. "Because there are better spells to stay skinny."

"No. I feel… Horrible."

"Then the spells will be fine."

And back to motherhood she went. Dragging me along behind her. Trying to make me into the kind of person she deserved.

I would tell her I wanted to brush my teeth.

She would look at me like I was insane.

But she would let me.

The only comforts I seemed allowed had to do with my appearance.

Even then… I felt sick still. Even then I felt sicker at the thought of her watching me, judging me. Thinking about what magic could improve on.

That was another sort of sickness. But that sickness rots other things. Keeps you up at night. Makes you want to cry when you cannot find the tears to do it.