Although she could get to Malfoy Manor on her own, she was more than grateful for him offering her his arm and extending the opportunity to side along to his home. Part of her was concerned that if she trusted her gut and tried to deliberate her way to the estate, she'd end up popping somewhere else entirely. As she stumbled upon landing, he brought a hand down to her elbow, catching her before she fell.

"Alright?" he asked, releasing her once she was steady on her feet.

"Yes, thank you. Shall we?"

Despite his new willingness to treat her with decency, the voice deeper within her mind reminding her that this was the same man who had made her life miserable as a boy. As they started walking toward the manor house, she turned to gaze at him. The sun was out in a rare showing of mercy for this time of year, and she was once again taken aback by how much he appeared to have changed—physically, at least.

A quick glance toward the towering home at the end of the long walk had her instantly concerned about being underdressed in her long linen pinafore and cotton blouse. She pushed down the moment of inadequacy and reminded herself that her clothing was perfectly normal, and the palatial estate before her was the anomaly, not her. Besides, if Malfoy's soft, casual clothing was anything to go by, even he didn't seem to put much in the oppressive formality that his ancestral home seemed to demand.

"Will you tell me about her? What is she really like?"

Malfoy glanced down toward her, almost surprised to hear her ask.

"It'll be easier to figure out where she might have gone if I know more about what she's like."

Malfoy nodded, slipping his hands into his pockets and slightly shortening his stride to make it easier for her to keep up.

"She is... grace. I have these memories of her getting ready for these insanely lavish parties they used to throw when I was a child. I remember she'd let me into her room while she'd get ready, asking my opinion about her earrings or shoes while she put on the prettiest dresses you can imagine. While they threw those parties, they relegated me to my rooms until I was old enough to start at Hogwarts. But before every one she'd dance with me in her room.

"She had this jewelry box that played some waltz or another. When I was small, she'd hold me and spin around the room with me, not caring whether I crushed the silk of her dress. When I was old enough to be taller than her knees, she'd lead while following. At the time, I felt as if I must be the most skilled leader in the world to make her dance in a way so lovely. As I got older, it became clearer that she was just leading our steps while moving backwards.

"After every one of the parties, she'd return to my rooms, and if I were still awake, she'd kick off her shoes and dance with me again. She said that she wanted her first and last dances of the night to be with her favorite Malfoy."

He took a moment to sigh, looking up toward the house and seeming to debate with himself whether to continue speaking.

"She was good at putting on a face, but she always exuded this profound sense of melancholy. She spoke little about her life before she moved into the manor. I don't know much about what she was like as a child. I know she liked the gardens, and whenever I couldn't find her in the house, I could usually find her out in the gardens. She had these white canvas pants she'd wear sometimes, the knees worn slightly. I suspect she was gardening out there, but I know that my father absolutely hated it when she'd get down in the dirt and the mud."

Hermione could almost picture it in her head as they walked. The warm breeze wafted over them and she could see Narcissa's fine blonde hair blowing in the breeze as she knelt in the dirt, pruning back a wayward plant and coaxing a vine to trail properly. Bright sun shining down on her as she worked to bring the gardens to life.

Malfoy pushed open the doors to the manor, gesturing for her to walk in first. Her shoes sounded nearly loud enough on the marbled tile to be embarrassing, and a shudder ripped down her spine as the sound ripped her memory back in time.

"No, don't please... It's a copy!"

"What did you take from my vaults?"

"I haven't been to your vaults! It's a fake!"

"This way, Granger. Her room is upstairs in the eastern wing."

His voice, deep and calm, broke through her panic, and she tried to shake off her unease. He was looking down at her with a cool, almost sympathetic look that seemed to settle something inside of her.

"Thank you," she said. "After you. I don't know my way around any further than the drawing room."

He inhaled sharply, pausing. "Do you need a moment? I'd try to apparate us upstairs, but the manor tends to resist anyone except blood trying to apparate within the walls, and I would hate to splinch you or leave you alone in a different hall."

She shook her head and took a deep breath, steeling herself. She looked around the large entrance hall, not having had but a moment to see it the first time she was in the home. "I'll be alright, but thank you for asking. We should go."

He looked at her carefully for a moment before nodding. "Alright. If you're sure," he said, before turning and leading the way up the stairs.

She followed him through the manor, trying not to gawk at the thick velvet curtains, the art on the walls that clearly belonged in a museum—assuming that it hadn't wasn't stolen from one. The portraits' eyes tracked her as she walked, but none of them spoke to her. She caught one in the corner of her eye, elbowing another, gesturing to her before whispering behind a hand. She couldn't hear make out the specific words it spoke, but given the reputation of the Malfoys, she wasn't sure that she wanted to. The walls in this part of the hallway were twice as tall as was ordinary, and the windows at the top of the walls cast a bright light into the long space, illuminating the dozens of portraits that stared down at the two of them as they walked.

It was almost impossible to reconcile this wing of the house with its vivid, painted life and the dark, dusty room where she'd writhed on the floor underneath Bellatrix Lestrange's wand.

Malfoy finally paused before an ornate door with a brass handle, shiny from use. "Merlin, I hope Potter's spell held," he whispered before reaching down to throw the door open.

The rooms within seemed like something that she'd pictured in her head while reading stories about princesses and their happily ever afters. But the lack of personal effects in the room made her doubt very much that this room had been anything save for another prison for the Malfoy matriarch.

She walked carefully through the room, the plush carpeting muffling the sound of her footsteps. Malfoy lingered in the doorway, fidgeting with his sleeves as if he were hesitant to enter the room fully. Ignoring him, she walked curiously through the space, touching nothing yet, examining the objects in the room.

"Is there anything that looks out of place or unusual to you?"

He shook his head before she even finished talking. "No, she did not give me leave to enter these rooms much in the last few years. It was her safe haven—I could only enter if she personally brought me in. Potter dismantled her charm work on the door, but it doesn't seem like a space that I'm allowed in."

She nodded absently, continuing to glance around the room. It may have been impersonal, but there was still something comforting about the blues, teals, and pinks of the decor. She had expected something more... green. Darker. But the bright and airy room felt like one that she would be pleased to live in herself.

She paused before a large portrait over the fireplace, what was unmistakably Narcissa herself, in a beautiful pale blue gown seated on the edge of an emerald velvet chair. Embroidered flowers trailed down the bodice of her gown, thinning as they descended the length of the dress. The plunging neckline and off-the-shoulder sleeves revealing a wide expanse of pale skin, a finely wrought—likely goblin made—tiara atop her fine blonde hair.

The portrait was still, which filled her with hope for a moment that Narcissa was still alive before she noticed that none of the portraits in the room were moving. She couldn't exactly fault the woman for wanting a reprieve from watching eyes.

"How thoroughly did the aurors go over these rooms?" she asked, spinning to face him and noting that nothing in the room appeared to be out of place and a slight covering of dust was atop most of the surfaces of the room.

"Not particularly," he scoffed, walking in fully. "They found the note and her wand, and labelled it an open and shut case. I don't know that they really looked at all. My father had asked the elves not to enter the room when she told him she was sick—said their 'incessant popping around' would irritate her. I asked them to keep out after I realized she was missing."

Hermione sighed, trying as hard as she could not to curse Harry's name—but part of her was equally grateful that she was able to see things exactly how Narcissa had left them last. Despite the dust, the room was almost preternaturally quiet. No correspondence, no books, no journals, nothing to make it appear that a woman lived in these rooms.

"Does your mother have any other room in the manor that she spends her time in?"

"Well, there's the lady's library," Malfoy said. "It's much the same as these rooms, except my father and I kept out by unspoken agreement, not magic."

"Could you take me there?" she asked, hoping that there would be more personality in that room to give her a hint as to the woman. This room would be deserving of a more thorough investigation, but there was still time for that if the library offered nothing else.

Malfoy nodded, leading her back out of the room. The lady's library was rather close to her quarters, and she was grateful that she didn't have to navigate the massive halls again. If she would make many trips to the estate to investigate, she was grateful that she could move between the two rooms with no escort through the maze-like hallways.

Malfoy opened another set of tall doors, leading her into the library. The walls in this room were a soft pink, cream damask settees made a seating area in the center, and tall bookshelves centered between the floor to ceiling windows nearly called her attention. An archway on one wall lead to a semicircle shaped room—part of a turret or some nonsense—that held a shining piano. A beautifully carved secretary desk was between two of the tall windows, and she moved toward it. Draco walked in after her, moving almost reverently through the space.

Hermione reached for the latch on the desk, surprised to find none. She trailed her fingers down the sides of the front, looking for the mechanism to release the writing surface, but could not locate one. Carefully lifting the candlesticks off of the top of the desk, she tried to open the glass doors that kept a series of leather wrapped books protected, but was unable to open them either.

A whispered alohamora did nothing to open the glass doors, nor to cause the writing top to drop down.

"Malfoy?"

In a heartbeat, he was by her side, running his hands along the seams of the wood, much as she had just a moment earlier.

"Does this open?"

He nodded, long thin fingers working at the wood. "I know it does. I remember sitting on the floor just over there while she wrote letters. There used to be an owl's perch where that bust of Morgan le Fay is," he said absently as he trailed his hand between the bottom of the drop top and the lower shelves.

Despite knowing that it was not at all the time for such thoughts, she couldn't help but notice how his long, pale hands caressed the wood, fingers lingering to rub at every knot in the wood as if it would reveal some hidden secret to him.

"There's something," he murmured, "just here. Feel."

His surprisingly warm hand flicked out to grab hers, pulling her forward as he curled her fingers to bring her index finger to sit alongside his. Just as he'd said, a small round hole, just shy of a centimeter across, was there, right underneath where the drop top came down. Hermione pulled her wand, lighting the tip to look into the hole to see what kind of key it took.

Seeing no mechanic inside by the light of her wand, she looked into the small hole, trying to see if she could figure out any way that the desk might open. Surely it wasn't usual to have a desk that locked up so tightly in a lady's library?

She felt Malfoy's hand rest on the elbow of her wand arm, and she looked up at him quizzically. He wasn't looking at her, but at her lighted wand as he gently pushed on her arm, moving the tip of her wand towards the hole. Unlike some wands—like the first one she'd gotten at Ollivander's at eleven—the tip of this one barely tapered, and the rounded end did little to push into the keyhole on the desk.

"It's not a keyhole," he said, ripping his hand from her arm to slip into the pocket of his trousers. "It's a wand nock."

He pulled two wands from the pocket of his trousers before returning the one that she recognized as his own, from the weeks that Harry had mastered it before returning it after the trial. The other one, slightly longer and made of a dark elm, he brandished with a light flick, the silver accents on the handle gleaming in the afternoon light streaming through the windows.

He lightly pressed the tip of the elm wand—his mother's wand—into the wand nock, where it slipped into the nock seamlessly. Rather than whisper a spell, she felt rather than heard him send a pulse of magic through his fingers and across the wood of the wand.

With a soft click, the drop top of the desk pulled away from the face of the desk, and he eased the wand from the nock before pulling the writing surface down and sliding it into place. Behind the face of the desk—beside the open letters and scattered parchment, quills both dull and sharp, gleaming penknife, the small framed photograph of a small blond child that could only be Malfoy—sat a single teacup upon a saucer. A small set of Georgian bone china, a silver spoon resting on the side of the saucer.

A perfect crescent of red lipstick on the edge of the cup.

Malfoy sat down heavily on the floor beside the desk, seemingly uncaring if his khaki colored trousers were dirtied—as if there would be any dirt on the floor of a lady's library.

"What if she's actually gone, Granger?"

Hermione knelt beside him on the floor, gently smoothing her dress around her knees. "What happened to hoping for the best?"

He dragged a hand down his face, lightly scrubbing at his eyes. "If she's still alive, then that means that she gave up. That she left me here, and she moved on. And if she's... dead... then that means that she did all of that and didn't even give me a chance to say goodbye."

Her heart lurched for him, despite it all. It would take some deaf and blind to not know how much Draco Malfoy cared for his mother, and despite his playacting at confidence with her, he was overwrought at the thought that something may have befallen her.

"We'll figure it out. Together. I tend to work alone, but I don't know her. Not like you do. Your knowledge and love of her will be an asset to finding her. But you don't have to pretend you aren't something that you are. It's not healthy. If you're upset, be upset. She's your mum—I'd be astonished if you were okay right now."

"As if she would ever let me call her something as gauche as 'mum'," he said is a soft voice, pulling an involuntary laugh from Hermione.

At the sound of her laugh, he gave her a small smile despite himself. "But honestly, Granger. Thank you. It means a lot to me that you've agreed to help me."

She lightly patted his arm and stood up, returning to the desk. "It's not everyone who gets to turn their desire to know everything and solve everything even remotely resembling a mystery into a career."

He stayed on the floor beside her, watching her look through the contents of the desk. She was, not for the first time, grateful for the speed with which she read as she tore through the letters on the top of the desk. Most of them were run-of-the-mill correspondence with Posey Parkinson or Celeste Greengrass. Nothing remarkable, nothing interesting. She only vaguely noted Malfoy leaning forward to ease the elm wand into another nock beside the drawers of the desk.

He pulled out a sheath of letters, bound in a rough twine, and flipped through them.

"Do you know an Evelyn Hall?" he asked, breaking both the silence and her concentration.

"Evelyn Hall? No. Should I?"

"Not necessarily," he said, flicking through the stack. "But these are all letters from her, whoever she is. I've never heard my mother mention her. And these are all addressed to 'C'. Many people close to her used to call her 'Cissa'."

Evelyn Hall. It wasn't much, but it was a name. And a name was more than they'd had to go off of a moment earlier.

"They look odd, though," he said, passing her one from the stack. "This isn't parchment."

She took the letter from his hand and immediately noticed two things. They were written on A4 paper, and with a muggle ballpoint pen.

A/N: Hermione's first trip back to Malfoy Manor! And a mysterious letter from a mysterious person. Who do you think Evelyn is? What's her deal?

I originally desperately wanted her to be named Eleanor, but apparently that's a "young person" name in the UK? Is that true? Every Eleanor I know in the US is 60+, but apparently it's a name common for women in their mid-twenties right now in the UK. Big if true.

I'd love to hear what you all think about this story! Thanks as always for reading and reviewing!