Mrs. Weasley was embracing her kids come home like a proud mother hen. I couldn't stop the pang of hurt I felt at the sight. I knew that my being at home would only hurt my parents, but… What a selfish girl I was. Shaking my head to clear the thought, I made my way over to the family.

"Ah, there you are, dear!" Mrs. Weasley called as I approached. "I heard that you've had a rough time at school. Don't you worry, don't you worry, we'll take good care of you. It'll be just like home before you know it. Now, has everybody got their things? Good, good. This way, everyone! Have you ever used a floo, Hermione dear?"

As I was swept up in the flood of magic and motherly concern, I held back tears. This was a good thing. My parents couldn't care for me, so the Weasleys were going to. I knew that. So why did it feel like a loss?

The Burrow

Floo travel, I'd decided, was not something for me. Stepping into a fire took a bizarre amount of willpower on its own, nevermind the subsequent feeling of hurtling through space and the ash in my lungs once I'd arrived. It was hard to fault literal teleportation, sure, but couldn't someone have made it even a bit more pleasant?

Once I'd recovered from my ordeal, I managed to take in my surroundings. All around me was the slow bustle of the Weasley family fitting themselves back into their home. Fred and George were busy regaling their father with tales that I doubted I'd believe were anyone else telling them, Percy had near immediately disappeared up a set of stairs, Ginny was being fussed over by her mother, and Ron was checking over his things.

As for the building itself, it looked… well loved. A big family lived here, no question. Old knick knacks sat on shelves leaning against worn books sorted in ways known only to whoever had placed them, abused couches sat pushed up next to each other, surfaces bore the signs of hands upon hands, and every single red-orange-gold thing in sight just screamed Weasley. It was cramped, it was crowded, and it was lively. It was different.

I was long accustomed to there being a place for everything and everything in its place at home. A housekeeper to keep everything straight when parents who'd spent more and more time at work couldn't keep it up themselves. "An orderly home makes for an orderly mind," as Dad always said. It was something I'd always believed. Still did, even. Looking around the Burrow, I couldn't help but wonder how anyone could live like this.

It was different, it was uncomfortable, and it wasn't home—not even when Mrs. Weasley met my eyes with a reassuring smile and Ginny approached me. "You'll be staying with me," she said. "I'm just up the stairs, come on."

Hefting my feather-light trunk once more, I followed Ginny to her room. It wasn't quite what I'd expected. Maybe I should have, though. The room itself was small, and every bit of available space on the walls seemed to be taken up by quidditch. A small bookshelf full of books titled Harry Potter and… sat in the corner, and Ginny sheepishly set her trunk in front of it. There were two beds in the room, though it was clear that there hadn't been until very recently from how hastily things looked to be shuffled around. Both were neat and tidy, and I had the distinct feeling that this was the last time I'd ever see something of Ginny's in such a state. Messiness was a family trait, it seemed.

"That side of the room's yours," she said. "This one's mine. Try not to touch my stuff, yeah?"

That thought had me pause in my unpacking for a moment. "Do people often go through your things?" She shrugged. It wasn't a no. "I could ward the room if you like, make it so only you and I can come in." Warding my things for privacy had been one of the first things Tom had taught me, actually.

Her eyes seemed to come to life at that before crashing down just as quickly. "We're not allowed to use magic outside of Hogwarts." Right. I'd almost forgotten.

I thought on it for a moment. Harry told Ron and I that he'd received a letter from the Ministry when a house elf had used magic at the Dursley's, but I'd already seen Mr. and Mrs. Weasley doing magic even in the short time I'd been here. Clearly, they didn't refrain for their kid's sakes, and I doubted any other magical families did either. I knew from Harry that it wasn't the person or magical core they were tracking, necessarily, so much as the household. You couldn't actually do that with wizarding families, though, there was just too much magic around. That said…

"Why'd your mum take our wands?" I asked.

Ginny gave me a strange look. "'Cause. We're not allowed to do magic," she explained slowly. "She didn't use to, but one time Bill tried to transfigure Scabbers and Mum got a letter from the Ministry. She was mad for weeks. Took everyone's wand right after."

So our cores weren't being tracked somehow, else they would've known that Harry hadn't cast that hover charm. It was the houses. That didn't work in wizarding homes, though, so they must be tracking the wands too. Really, it made sense. Wands all came from the same place. It'd be easy to tell Ollivander to put a tracker on all of them. Which meant that in a magical home and without a wand…

There was only one way to test my theory. "I think I might be allowed to use magic, actually," I said. Ritual didn't exactly require a wand, after all.

"Really?" Ginny looked like Christmas had come early.

"I think so." Turning to my book bag, I rummaged around until I found what I needed: one of several sigils I'd drawn up for lighting candles and cauldron fires. "Have you got a candle?"

It took maybe five seconds of frantic, excited searching on Ginny's part before she produced a small white candlestick that had nearly run out. I placed the sigil on the ground, and set the candle on top of it. I sat down and Ginny followed suit. Placing my hands on the edge of the sigil, I took a deep breath. The point of most rituals was that they spoke for themselves, no extra wand waving or the like necessary. Not for ones this simple, at least. This one in particular called for an attunement Life, Chaos, and Legacy. Despite being clearly and obviously chaotic, it seemed fire had a strangely deep connection to Life. As for the Legacy, well, Incendio was hardly a new spell, after all. The bits of the runes that I'd translated seemed to be something of an exultation about the virtues of the target catching flame while occasionally declaring that the caster would make sure to appreciate the light and warmth the fire provided. It made sense; the spell called to two Light Powers and one Dark with little heed paid to their opposites.

Point being, activating a completed ritual circle was fairly easy. Feed the slightest bit of magic into the start of the sigil with maybe a small incantation, and it would take what magic it needed from the world around you. An easy feat, even despite and perhaps because of my particular condition. Only thing to do from there was ensure that the price, if any, was paid. Mandy Enoch had been very clear on that part. In her own words: 'Learn from the stories of eld: Only the unlucky survive cheating the Powers their due.'

Ginny watched in awe as I placed my hand on the outer edge of the sigil and muttered "Incendio." It was underwhelming, really. No flash of light or anything, the wick just suddenly caught. Now all that was left was the price. I scooped the candle up and gazed into the fire a few moments before looking up to Ginny. "Amazing, isn't it?"

She nodded with the sort of vigour I was quickly coming to expect from her. "You didn't even need a wand!" she whisper-yelled. I laughed. From the sounds coming from below us, I didn't expect much risk of getting caught.

"Can't exactly go duelling with it, but the bright side of all this is that it really is fascinating," I said with a smile. Setting the candle on a shelf, I started to unpack my things while explaining how rituals worked. Ginny quickly lost interest. Really. I go to the trouble of explaining the underpinnings of how magic worked, and people didn't even try to care.

I was interrupted from my disappointment by the sound of an owl pecking at the window. Ginny and I both froze.

"I think it might be for you," she said slowly. I swallowed with a nod. Had I been wrong?

I opened the window, and the owl perched on the sill while extending its leg. Gingerly, I took the roll of parchment from it's talons looking at it as if it might explode. I turned it over, and the tension fled from my body as soon as I saw the name of the addressee in messy, uneven script.

Ginny Weasley

I handed it over, and she bristled. "I swear if you got me in trouble for something I didn't even do—"

"Look at it, Ginny. The handwriting is sloppy. There's no way it's from the Ministry." She took another look and relaxed a bit. She relaxed even more once she opened it up.

"It's from a friend," she said.

"It's been, what, an hour since we got off the train? Bit keen, aren't they?"

She rolled her eyes. "So you said you can keep people out of my room?" she asked just a bit too quickly.

I decided to let it go. "If you like, yes."

"Please. I swear if the twins leave something under my pillow one more time…"

With that little tidbit, I decided to start immediately. Frankly, I didn't want Fred or George to have access to my own things either. I had a vested interest. Maybe if I did something with the door, no, I'd need to cover the window too; the Weasleys were all fliers. A quick check of A Ritualist's Spellbook showed that Dumbledore hadn't thought wards to be appropriate material for a third year. Of course he hadn't. Heaven forbid I have the tools to defend myself. No, I'd have to improvise something. It couldn't be that hard. I had so many working rituals to work off of, anyway. Some of them I'd even translated!

An hour and a half later, Ginny came back into the room—when had she left?—to pull me from my scattered parchment and books for supper.

If Gryffindor had prepared me for the Weasley family dinner, it was only just. At the very least, I could see more clearly where Ron got it. Fred and George seemed to believe themselves responsible for entertainment to nobody's great shock. Ginny spent much of the time telling Mr. Weasley about her year, and Percy had been sucked into trying to tell off the twins. Mrs. Weasley fussed, as seemed to be a trend. Ron, though, was telling me all about the summer we were going to have.

"—There's a few families around here. There's the Diggorys out north, and the Lovegoods to the south. Cedric Diggory comes over occasionally to play quidditch with us, though we'll have to get past the 'Summerly Storytelling' for that," he said with clear distaste.

"The 'Summerly Storytelling'?" I asked.

"Yeah," Ron took another bite. He went to continue, but I glared at him until he swallowed. "Mr. Lovegood—right nutter, he is—invites everyone over start of every summer to gather round a fire and tell stories. Mum makes us go every year. Bill used to tell the best stories. One time—"

"Are you talking about the Lovegoods?" Percy interrupted from his place beside Ron.

"Was just telling Hermione about the Storytelling."

Percy winced. "Maybe Hermione shouldn't attend, after…" He trailed off.

"After what?" I asked.

"Well Mr. Lovegood's stories tend to be a little… macabre. He's a bit, well you see, he's a bit off," he finally admitted.

"A bit off?" I asked as levelly as I could.

"He's right mad," Ron said frankly. "Luna too. Whole family of nutters."

Percy sighed. "Not how I would put it, but yes. Mad."

"I see," I said carefully. "And you think that I wouldn't be able to handle a children's story that's a 'little macabre'?"

"Well after everything that happened," Ron said, "Nobody would blame you."

I huffed and stood. "Well I think I will be attending, actually. I'm not made of glass, and being unable to wave a stick around and have sparks fly out doesn't make me fragile." I turned to the rest of the family, and realised then that the room had gone silent. "Thank you for the meal and for inviting me into your home, Mrs. Weasley. I think that I'm going to bed. Apologies if I've been a bit off."

"Have a good night, dear!" she called after me. Soon as I turned the corner and started climbing the stairs, I heard her telling off Percy and Ron.

That night, I fell asleep in a nest of parchment.


I woke to a nightmare early the next morning, and quickly grew restless. It felt strange to be wandering around someone else's house when the owners were asleep, but this strange sense of needing to do something overrode most everything else. I didn't want to light up a candle and risk waking Ginny, so I dressed in the dark, crept out of the room, down the stairs, and out the front door.

The Burrow, even in the dark, still very obviously belonged to the Weasley family. It almost could have passed as mundane from the outside. The chicken coop and pig pen were practically normal, if rural. The garden held a mess of plants, and if I hadn't recognized a good few as magical I wouldn't have blinked. No, the grounds themselves seemed utterly mundane. The thing that screamed Weasley to anyone who cared to look was the building itself. It looked like someone had started building an aboveground cellar and then experimented with potions to find out which induced the most pleasing delirium before finishing out the construction. It was obviously magical, if only because muggle buildings didn't bend over themselves one way only to bend back the other after a floor. It was clearly a building that was added on to as the family needed it, with little regard given to sensibility so much as functionality.

Frankly, it made me a bit uncomfortable to look at. So I didn't. Instead, I propped myself up on a fence and just… processed.

What had been going on with me recently? I'd sniped at McGonagall, punched Malfoy (I still wasn't sorry), and yelled at Ron in his own home! It was mortifying to think about. He'd seen I needed help and offered it without a second thought, and I paid him back by embarrassing him at dinner. It wasn't like me. Hermione Granger is a neat, orderly girl who values taking care of her friends, following the rules, and learning all she can. Or she was, at least. Now she yelled at people who were trying to help her and had to restrain herself from mouthing off to teachers.

The worst part was, I was still angry! Ever since McGonagall had called me 'fragile', had called me a 'victim', being protected and doted on just grated like nothing else. Professor Snape and Harry might have had to save me, yes, but I was hardly some damsel in distress. Just because I regretted it didn't mean I hadn't made all the choices to walk myself into the Chamber of Secrets. I wasn't helpless. In fact, I'd had Lord Sodding Voldemort teaching me Dark Arts for almost six months! My own choices had scared everyone in the school, much as I felt awful about it. I wasn't a victim, I was… I was a survivor. I was strong, I was powerful, I was…

I was special. That's it, really. Tom had made me feel special. That's all there was to it. I'd always had a hard time with people picking on me in school. Even before Hogwarts, the swot hardly ever made friends. Despite myself, my very first conversation with him flashed through my mind, as it often did.

If I need to be anything, then I can be a friend. I know how hard it can be to find friends of worth when you're the most clever one in the room. People get ever so jealous.

He'd had me wrapped around his finger from the very start. I was supposed to be the smart one. The one who didn't fall for this kind of thing. He'd used me, right from the start. I'd survived, though. He hadn't expected that.

He'd still planned for it, though.

I remembered keenly going back and forth on whether or not I would make my vows to him for weeks and weeks. It was another opportunity to feel special, to feel superior, and so I'd confidently and happily made the wrong choice. And why not? It wasn't the first time he'd had me make some strange potion impromptu, or the first time he'd asked me to trust him, or even the first time he'd had me use my blood as an ingredient. Even still, though, I could recognize how wrong I was.

If—when—the Dark Lord Tom Marvolo Riddle found a way to resurrect himself in truth, I'd have a choice to make. Maybe by then I'd be strong enough to choose the right one.

I let out a low keening wine, and pressed my forehead to the jagged wood of a fencepost. I'd gone from feeling so special, so above the world and everyone in it, to being a liability. I couldn't even cast spells. Not quickly, at least. When war came—and it would be coming; Ron may be able to delude himself and Harry might want to ignore it, but the writing was on the wall—I'd be near useless. Worse than useless. A month ago, I would have been able to hex anyone my year and a few above me into submission if need be. Now? Now I was just another someone that needed to be protected.

It hurt, recognizing that. Acknowledging it. I hated it, for all that Harry and Ron playing bodyguard had been flattering at first. I wanted to be useful. Needed it, really. Tom had exploited that. I wanted to hate him too. Truthfully, though, I wasn't doing very well at that.

I was a survivor. I'd survived Lord Voldemort trying to kill me, and I hadn't even been protected by any sort of blood ward like Harry was (or so Tom and I had assumed). I wasn't made of glass. I was a big girl. I could handle Malfoy, or walking the halls alone, or a few scary stories. Honestly. It made me wonder what Ron sees when he looks at me.

"Hermione, dear?" Mrs. Weasley's voice interrupted my train of thought, and I pulled my face away from the fence. The sky was beginning to lighten now. "You're up early."

"I couldn't sleep," I said lamely. "I'm sorry about yesterday. It wasn't appropriate of me."

"Thank you dear, but it's not me you should be apologising to." A moment passed, and she clicked her tongue. "Why don't you come with me? You can help me out with a few chores."

I nodded and followed. There wasn't really any way to tell her no after I'd embarrassed myself last night. She led me to the chicken coop, and floated a big bag of feed over to me with the flick of her wand. "Just take a few handfuls and scatter them around. Nice and wide, these little devils don't much care for sharing." I followed instructions, watching the chickens gather round. "I wanted to let you know I talked to Ron," she said. "Poor boy's far too good at sticking his foot right in his mouth."

A moment passed, and the silence grew uncomfortable. "I'm just tired of being treated like I'm going to fall apart any moment if someone touches me," I confessed.

"We're all just worried for you," she said softly. "After this last year, I think we all have a right to be a little worried. If it was Ron who got nabbed by that book, wouldn't you be worried too?" That was…

"Well, yes," I admitted.

"That just means you care, dear. Oh, that's enough feed I think. Go ahead and put that bag back for me." I did as asked. The bag was a far sight heavier when it was me lifting it and not magic. "As I was saying, it just means you care. It means that Ron cares too. Can you blame him for caring?"

"No I can't, but…" I trailed off.

"But?" She prompted.

I let out a heavy sigh. "I'm just tired of people acting like I'm going to break. I'm not fragile."

Mrs. Weasley stepped forward to rub my arm. "No, you're not. If you were, you wouldn't be here, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Ron, though, he's a young man, and when men get worried they like to wrap everything up in layers and layers of cotton to keep it all safe as can be."

"Well," I grumbled, "I hate it."

She laughed a bit, and wrapped me up in a hug. "You'll come to find that sort of thing charming in time, I promise." I let her hold me like I was her own child for a moment, and she didn't mention the tears in my eyes when the moment passed and she pulled apart.

I took a deep breath. "Thank you, Mrs. Weasley."

She gave me another smile, much stronger this time. "You can thank me by helping me with breakfast." She hefted up a basket of eggs she'd gathered as I'd fed the chickens. "It's my boys' first breakfast of the season here, and I want to make it special."

"Yeah, sure. Okay." One didn't exactly say no to someone after something like that, after all, and especially not to Mrs. Weasley.

She dragged me inside, setting me to task. Very quickly after that, she set me to a far more simple task. I'd thought I was doing just fine, but Mrs. Weasley's grumbles wondering what parents were teaching these days left me with no doubts about how she felt. Eventually, breakfast came and went with half hearted enthusiasm. It seemed as if the whole family were late sleepers. Mrs. Weasley and I were the only ones truly awake.

Mr. Weasley, for his part, used the relative silence to question me about all manner of muggle things. 'Elektikity' ("It's called electricity and it's made up of energy,"), garbage disposals ("I don't have one, but my grandma does, and there's not animals trapped inside I promise,"), and street lights ("They tell the cars when to stop and go so nobody runs into each other,") among other things. It was more than a bit eye opening. This was the man meant to be an expert among wizards on muggle 'artifacts'. I felt a pang of simultaneous righteousness and annoyance at having opted out of Muggle Studies for my next year. It really would have been fascinating to see just how wrong they were, how the pureblood attitudes were formed, if nothing else.

It wasn't until Ron left to go do some flying and Mrs. Weasley gave me a significant and unambiguous nod in his direction that I made my excuses to Mr. Weasley, who'd insisted that I call him Arthur. I found Ron outside in a shed full of shelves of various disassembled muggle things and notes adorning all of them. Set up on a workbench next to a notebook, it seemed that Mr Weasley's current project was taking apart a clock and… straightening the springs? Surely wizarding clocks had springs, right?

Shaking my head as if to free myself of the insanity, I turned to Ron, who was standing in front of what looked to be a cabinet full of brooms and balls. It seemed to have a pile of dirt and mud caked on its floor. If only there were some convenient tool to resolve that, I thought with a mental roll of my eyes.

Ron blinked slowly at my entrance. "Er, hey Hermione," he said, shuffling his feet. "Was just gonna grab the brooms. D'you wanna go flying?"

"No, Ron," I took a deep breath. "Your mum wants me to apologise."

He shrugged, getting a strange look on his face. "'S fine. Forgotten, really. Percy though, he was right heartbroken. Think he thought he'd have someone to talk know-it-all with." Ron gave a little laugh. "So, about going flying…"

Another deep breath. It wouldn't do to get mad at him right after apologising. Even if I wanted to. Plenty of time for that later. "No, I was actually going to get my summer homework done. You should too, you know."

"Eh, I'll do it later." Ron grabbed an old broom that seemed slightly less tired than his wand.

"And you wonder why your grades are low. You realise that I'm not letting you copy my work, right?"

"Oh come on, please? I'll show you—" I never found out what he was going to show me, though, as Fred, George, and Ginny all came bursting into the shed and swept Ron up and outside. I huffed. Well, if that's how it was, then he could go crying to someone else about his still unfinished homework when we were on the train back.


A few days passed, and life seemed to pass as normal for the Weasley family. Or I assumed so, at least. Things fell into a sort of rhythm. Percy and I, I was proud to say, had both finished our respective homework. He'd let me peek at the sorts of things he was doing in studying for his N.E.W.T.s, and it was more than a bit fascinating. Most of it was above the skill level of what I could actually do, especially given my particular situation. Still, though, I was almost shocked by how much I understood. Part of that was thanks to Tom, yes, but nowhere near as much as I'd have guessed.

Fred and George had given it all of 48 hours before they'd decided I was fair game, and had planted a dungbomb under my pillow. It felt like Mrs. Weasley had yelled at them for hours. Needless to say, I'd redoubled my work on the ward for Ginny's room. After peeking at Percy's spellbooks—a request he'd allowed with an understandably wary look given the family he was used to—I'd had an idea. Just setting up the door to give a shock as Ginny had once suggested would only work for about five minutes before Mrs. Weasley caught on to the technically-legal magic, and I didn't think she'd appreciate the technicalities.

Instead, I could do something similar to the Notice-Me-Not charm, rendering the room and its contents simply unworthy of attention to anyone not designated. If the door and window were both closed, then any thought that led to entering the room would simply be dismissed. That was the idea, at least. Articulating that in runescript in a way that would actually work was proving to be a bit challenging. I was certainly starting to see why Mandy Enoch had called it a negotiation with the Powers, even if I disagreed with the agency it assigned them.

Still, nothing disastrous had happened. My one and only attempt so far had dissuaded Ron once, but the dungbombs had proven it was no use against someone determined. I thought I knew what I was doing wrong, though. Wards were a bit sensitive. You needed to have a sort of feel for the magic of the place before you could set one up. It wasn't even an issue of needing to change the runes, so much as it was just acclimatisation. Both me acclimatising to the magic and the magic acclimatising to me, if you believed Tom.

And when it came to magic, choosing not to believe Tom seemed to be a poor choice indeed.

If anyone were to ask, that was why I was walking around the Burrow with my wand out and my eyes closed. I was a bit too focused to be giving that sort of response though, and I was pretty sure that someone had come up, and I'd simply told them I was "feeling out the magic," without much more in the way of explanation. I was, too. Feeling it out, that is. Tom had shown me how to sort of 'see' the magic in a place when teaching me about wards. It was almost meditative, removing the self from the self and letting the magic speak for itself. The feeling was rather like a pressure from all around; like when a storm was coming in or when you were sitting underwater. Learning to feel like this had taken weeks and weeks. It was rather like learning to see your own nose at will: the information was already there and always had been, it was just… filtered out. Tom had even said that with practice (and perhaps the aid of certain rituals; the animal bonding ritual he'd talked about came to mind), a witch could learn to feel even more from the ambient magic than just a feeling of weight.

It had taken me maybe a few hours to even get that much at the Burrow. I'd gotten to the point where it only took me a few minutes to feel Hogwarts when I'd tried. The Burrow though, it was… barren, comparatively speaking. I imagined most places would feel barren compared to Hogwarts, though. Beyond even that, the Burrow felt almost static. I hadn't realised it until I had somewhere else as a comparison point, but Hogwarts' magic had seemed to almost breathe. It was a slightly disorienting change, to say the least.

At some point, there was a shift. A sort of… cluster? A weight? Like laying down under a pool and having someone pour in more water off to the side. I opened my eyes to see what it was, and was met with Mrs. Weasley. I blinked dumbly for a moment before realising that it must have been her core I was feeling. Magic was supposed to wrap itself around the cores of magical things like witches. I supposed it made sense that I wouldn't recognize the feeling. I'd hardly practised with Tom around other people, after all.

Whatever the case, Mrs. Weasley was walking up to me with a badly hidden concerned look and an opened letter in her hand. "We got some mail for you, dear. You might like a look." She handed it over, and I unfolded the letter warily.

Miss Hermione Granger,

I have been looking over some of the measurements I took when you were last here in the Hospital Wing, and believe that it would be in your best interests to continue seeking treatment for your condition outside of school. I feel it would be unwise to let things stand as they are. To this end, I have forwarded a copy of my notes on your condition to St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.

I firmly advise you to seek an appointment as soon as possible. The health of your magic is not the sort of thing one delays treatment for.

Madam Poppy Pomfrey

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

I looked up from the letter to see Mrs. Weasley's concerned face while schooling the expression on my own. "I've already owled to set up an appointment for you, dear, there's no need to worry," she said.

Really, one would think that Madam Pomfrey would've at least seen fit to tell me what was going on with my own magic. Absolutely typical. I imagined that actual doctors in a hospital would give me that courtesy, at the least.

"Thank you," I said instead. "When's the appointment?"

"Tomorrow morning, first thing," Mrs. Weasley chirped with cheer I could only assume was forced. "There's no need to worry. I'm sure there's nothing to worry about."

And funnily enough? I believed her. This had to be the sort of situation the doctors at this St. Mungo's place handled every day. 'Magical Maladies' was in the name, after all. Maybe it was the Burrow, maybe it was the lingering feeling of magic flowing through me, and maybe it was the relentless positivity of the Weasleys rubbing off on me, but for the first time since Tom it felt like things were going to be alright. This was just a speedbump.