Hermione remembers the day of the Big Problem.
In the memory, she's climbing out of her mother's forest green Subaru, clutching her Pet Hospital Barbie. The doll had frayed, tangled brown hair, its dereliction innocently mirroring her own wild frizz.
She's still not sure why she entered the glass-paned door behind her mother.
On any other day, she would bound up the concrete steps and race through the entrance marked in sun-bleached stickers Granger Family Dentistry.
By six, the hygienist, the kindly office manager and all the assistants would have gone home. The suction would be shut off, the tools sanitized and put away for the day.
Her father would be puttering around his office, reading a medical journal or looking at radiographs from the DA's office, matching dental signatures with John Does for his buddy, Crouch.
Hermione doesn't remember much.
But she recalls standing behind the crumpling form of her mother. There was a wail, perhaps. She remembers the window rattling with its gut-wrenching tremor.
She remembers Pet Hospital Barbie's little Velcro-cinched dress. Red.
She remembers red.
In the morning, Hermione wakes up to find Tom climbing on top of her.
At first she wonders if it's some kind of retaliation.
He slept in the leather Eames in her room, just to keep her locked up. The chains were slack enough for sleep, but she made sure to disturb him at least three times, bleating for the toilet.
"You just went," he croaked at two in the morning, rubbing his eye.
"Try having a small person living on your bladder," she replied, flouncing to the bathroom.
When she wakes up, he's wrapping something around her throat and she gasps, ripping against her chains.
"Easy, easy now," he croons. His fingertips whisper against her paper throat, fastening something.
His face has the hollowness of poor sleep, but the keen light in his eyes is livid with feral energy. Her chest thumps.
He unclips her wrists and ankles and she sits up, her fingers floating to her neck.
"Did you… collar me?" she says, her eyes locking with herself in the mirror.
It's a velvet choker sewn with little glinting stones of the clearest water. Not like… real diamonds, right?
A low buzzing sound resonates in his chest. He unclasps each of her cuffs.
"I'm letting you free today, but I want you to remember who's enforcing your responsibilities," he says. "I'd stay, but I have a test in AP Calc that I can't miss."
Hermione barks,
"I have a test in AP Calc I can't miss!"
" You have a complication called placenta previa which is among the leading causes of fetal and maternal morbidity."
Something raw in his voice fractures the justification for her anger. But only a hairline crack.
"What are the numbers?" she asks, growing quiet.
Tom lifts his eyebrows, lips tightening as he unbuckles her hand.
"Surely you know," she presses him.
He lingers his thumb over the fragile blue threads of her wrist.
"Fourteen percent maternal," he says. "As much as fifty percent natal."
"That seems high… I'd like to see the sample size."
His voice hardens to stone.
"There's a lot that can go wrong, Hermione."
No arguing with that.
But Hermione struggles on the cusp of something, the moment before knowing. She wants to tell him she trusts herself.
Since clearing out the distractions of that house and Lestrange, and maybe even Ron's puppy eyes and Harry's obsessive revenge campaign, she can finally hear herself think.
"I know I'm alright," she says, settling a sure hand on her belly.
Tom eyes her with an expression she can't decipher. The dark fringe of his lashes skim his angled cheekbones, his nearness becomes tense with a strange energy.
"Obey your instructions, angel," he says, almost like a sigh.
And he leaves for school.
The rest of the week, Hermione behaves herself.
She keeps to her bed in the morning, the couch before lunch and a reclining chair on the balcony during the sunniest hours of the afternoon.
And, true to his word, Tom rewards her with homework and her books. She bides her time; reading with him in the evening, watching that dumb office show (which isn't so bad,) arguing with him about Hardy and Dickenson.
"His poetry is his most underrated contribution to the literary canon."
"It's sexist horseshit is what it is!"
He doesn't bring her old clothes and won't let her near a computer or phone. She tosses a green smoothie at him when he refuses to tell her how her mother is doing. He chains her to the bed the rest of the evening.
"You're cruel! Cruel, you know that? I have a right to check on my mother!"
"The only mother you need to look after is yourself, starlight."
By the following Friday, he leaves her prized Constructive Analysis on the kitchen countertop. She opens it and finds a note in his fanciful script.
It's a few lines from Hardy's "The Ruined Maid" (asshole.) Underneath, he wrote a list of what she can eat today and what he wants her wearing when he gets back.
Still a fucking psycho.
She glimpses the choker in every mirror and windowpane, it's dazzling sparkle throwing elegant little glints back at her.
Like a coy wink,
"We know you're loving these cushy digs, girl! Don't feel bad for being fabulous!"
And she doesn't feel bad about demanding xiao long bao and steak or even spilling shrimp sauce on her cashmere sweatpants.
But she does feel bad about how easy it's getting to forget her mom, buried somewhere in her sorrows. To forget what she heard Tom say about Harry.
Still, what's she going to do with the threat of bleeding out at any second? Why is everyone else in her life such a source of stress?
Hermione knew Riddle had a household staff, but they seemed pretty damn a la carte in the two weeks she'd occupied the waterfront house. Tom liked cooking himself, and she's pretty sure he was the one scraping her failed brownie-shit off the upper cabinets. Ha.
This is why she nearly jumps out of her bones when, after a midday nap, she comes to the upper landing of the stairs and hears a strange voice.
Down below, a small bald man, withered like overripe fruit, bends over her coffee stain, frantically driving a foaming brush across the carpet.
His high voice warbles a thin monologue, but she can't hear what he's saying until she gets to the bottom of the stairs.
"Master Tom will be displeased with Dobby, Dobby must have mixed the borax incorrectly and now young Master Tom must buy a new carpet…"
"I'm sorry," Hermione stumbles across the living room, her cheeks flushing. "I spilled the coffee, you shouldn't have to do that."
The tiny man leaps to his feet when she approaches. His ears stick out, away from the leathery wrinkles of his head like they're built to hear the slightest demand.
"Mistress Riddle!" he shrills. "Mistress Riddle mustn't be out of bed, ma'am! Mistress Riddle will go back upstairs and Dobby will put on a pot of tea…"
"I want to help," she says, "Tom didn't tell me that any one else… well… the mess is sort of my fault."
"Fault!" Dobby's lids twitch. "Mistress Riddle is the lady of the house Dobby lives to serve!"
Hermione frowns like swallowing a bad taste.
"...Lives to serve?"
"Dobby has been working for Master Tom's father since before he was born!"
"God, I hope he pays you well," she says.
"Dobby is not telling Mistress Riddle about such indiscreet things, but the whole house has been spotless for decades because Dobby cares for it! Excepting this nasty stain!"
The man whimpers, returning to the coffee splotch with the scrub brush.
"Bad Dobby!"
Damn, maybe Tom didn't clean that shitty mess the other day, that sucks.
But what if…
"Dobby," Hermione says, "do you have keys to every room?"
Dobby peers up at her, his big, owl eyes without guile.
"Mistress Riddle is needing Dobby's help?"
"Yes," she says, smiling. "I left something in Mr. Riddle's office."
He studies his scrub brush for a moment, thinking.
"But Master Tom says Dobby must keep the office locked. Dobby does not wish to make Master Tom angry!"
Hermione pauses, her gaze fixed on the wretched stain on the carpet.
Maybe Tom was right. She should stop enmeshing with others and do what she needs to.
For herself.
"Tom won't be upset if I'm in there," she says, batting her lashes. "Besides, how could I have left something in his office if I weren't allowed?"
Dobby seems to puzzle over this. Then, he slowly stands.
"Dobby will help Mistress Riddle," he says, brightening like an innocent flower.
Her heart rate starts to climb as she follows the odd little man down the hall.
She doesn't hear his chortling words as the lock tumblers click and the door glides open.
"Thank you, Dobby." Her own words sound underwater in her ears.
She exchanges a smile with him, closing the door.
And she's in.
The office projects the sort of grandness that might make someone forget its occupant is barely of age. Posh mid century furniture. Sleek built-ins of dark wood coolly illuminating expensive sculptures of lions, eagles and sharks. Dizzying walls of books, extending all the way up the vaulted ceiling.
Breathlessly, she drifts toward his enormous executive desk, inhaling the tranquil smells of fresh printer paper, leather and hand-rolled tobacco.
Hermione snorts up at an oversized abstract painting in the style of Jackson Pollock, the earnest opaqueness of its strokes just a little too try-hard.
Nice, Riddle. Muddy the waters to seem deep.
There's a tag by the painting and she looks closer.
The f…? Shit!
It's actually a legit Pollock.
Never fucking mind.
If this is his private home office, she's not sure she wants to see the one at the top of Emerson Tower in Downtown Seattle. Pompous prick.
Might be kinda cool, though.
Settling in his desk chair, the supple leather sticks to her thighs where the hem of her floral slip rides up. She's sweating.
She snatches up the phone, dialing without thinking.
The line buzzes in her ear.
"Come on, mom. Pick up."
"We're sorry, the number you are trying to reach has been disconnected, please hang up…"
Hermione hits the red button and drops the phone clattering onto the desk like it burned her fingers.
Her chest heaves, up and down.
Stars halo around her vision.
He wouldn't.
There's no way he could. Could he?
Come on, Granger, think like a psychopath.
She shakes the mouse on his desktop and the screen flickers awake.
Password? It asks.
Shit.
She tries his birthday. Don't ask how she knows that.
Doesn't work.
She tries the names of various dictators and serial killers. No? Huh.
A chill creeps up her spine.
And she tries her birthday.
Nope. Frick, what a relief.
Having exhausted every anagram of 'Tom Marvolo Riddle' she can think of, she types,
Hermione Jean Granger
Also a no.
Her throat catches.
Hermione Jean Riddle
And the screen lights up like a goddamn circus.
"The fuck!" she caws.
The desktop image is a photo taken from a distance away. Stark, with the harsh contrasts of a blue morning in early fall.
It's her.
Leaning against the balustrade outside the school's south exit, she clutches a binder against her dark sweater. A pensive glance out of the camera's frame sweeps her hair ever-so-delicate against her cheek.
She knows when he took it.
But why did he do it? Why then?
There's a folder marked "Basilisk" and she clicks on it.
A project spreadsheet opens.
She reads.
"No…"
Her lungs crush.
"No, no, no!"
Cortisol zips through her veins like snake venom.
Fucking, why?
Her fingers shake as she scoops up the phone again.
She gets an answering machine.
"Harry?" she wheezes into the receiver. "It's Hermione, I'm fine, but I need to talk to you. I'm at 18541 Normandy Terrace."
It's just a small glance upward, and she stops.
The door hangs open, its frame darkened by a perilous shadow.
There is no amusement, no light glimmering at his edges.
Here comes death.