Dorcas watched a pod of pelicans glide silently over the water silhouetted by the darkening sky. She wrapped the knitted blanket around herself tighter against the chill. They would be traveling south soon. It was getting late in the season to even catch the sight of them even now. They formed a jagged line that snaked its way along the coast and they dipped down towards the water. They were kept aloft it seemed by a small buffer of air above the calming ocean. She had felt all of this before. The oppressive beauty of this level of quietude and the obliviousness of nature to human loneliness. Only the sound of pockets of air being pressed out of a collapsing wave would remain, she knew. She would have written to grandpa like before but he had died, joyfully at St. Mungo's. She had been told it was very peaceful and chose to believe that even though she had said that to people once. It felt like a long time ago now. Having to lie to someone about the level of peace of a loved one. Maybe everyone does, after all. What else is left after death? She knew it was true for grandpa, though, if only because a healer at St. Mungo's had said he had passed mid-smile at a little bit of magic. His favorite: making a flower dance.

-

When Dorcas left school, she mistakenly believed she had no where to go. She instead found a place on the coast. Her plan was to work during the summer holiday and pay her lodging but beyond that she knew if she went back home she would have to find a way to tell Philippa where she'd been all this time. She told herself that she'd be breaking the statute of secrecy but all the muggleborns she'd gone to school with, that law was really just a strongly worded suggestion. Once her money ran out, and it was not ideal, she knew there would be vacant lodging by early fall as people decamped back to the city and she could find a place to stay there. If she was going to stay in someone's home, she would rather not. She was already infringing on other people's space. She might as well go back to live with Philippa and grandpa.

She overheard a small group of youth talk about meeting up later to smoke in a little abandoned place down a little ways from the beach. She didn't make that much money but it might be enough to cover the cost there. As the sherbet-colored summer wore on, she decided to make her way early in the morning when she knew the hangovers were too strong to care about smoking. She found the place, a sea shanty really, smelling of smoke and littered with alcohol bottles. She looked around and traced her shoe in the thin wisps of sand that had been tracked in. On a short autumn day after her money had nearly run out and the beach became deserted except for a few stragglers, she spent a days worth of manual cleaning and hours of magic to put the shack right. This is where she'd live until next summer when she'd figure out the next thing.

Summer had made its warm slide into the softness of fall. Dorcas had not much to do but swim and overthink and she did both everyday. Only one of things made her stronger in some ways. She became a better ocean swimmer and in that time learned that she enjoyed swimming in the sea more than pools. She liked watching the sun rise or set while in the water floating on her back. The roll of waves lifting her slightly before they broke closer to shore. No one could tell her to go home or that she was wasting her time. She had nowhere to be, nothing to do or study. She occasionally wrote grandpa when she found enough spare change. She could lie and say she was training for something if pressed but no one was there to press that point or any others. She padded around the boardwalk and used some of her money saved from the summer to get food multiplied by magic which made all of it tasteless.

Where would she say she went to school? What skills did she have that she had learned that she could say to even get a job? Years later, years and years when she was stuck in another cabin it struck her how naive and ridiculous she had been. She could have very easily lied and used magic to make her life easier. Lydia said as much about her own parents. They lived in muggle suburbs because they had muggle money because they had muggle jobs. They lived in a rich neighborhood because they were muggle (and wizard) rich. Lydia knew Dorcas but had to tell her. If she wanted to live amongst muggles. She could have such an easy life and it would have been easier to navigate because she had grown up with muggles, something neither of her parents had done. She understood through her upbringing things that other people had to learn in adulthood but it never crossed her mind. Lydia did not get impatient with Dorcas, the one person on Earth that she didn't scoff at but she had this time.

"It's not dishonest or honest. Don't martyr yourself to your own magic. It's not about honesty; it's about maintaining a sense of struggling."

Dorcas would have a lot of time to swim and reflect again. She thought of what Lydia had said in their flat share. She understood after she had no home to go to: when Philippa had been sent away, after knowing grandpa was gone and she could not go to Lydia for fear of putting her in danger, that she had a home all along. If she had another time to sit somewhere by the sea, she might have come to the same conclusion about this time. She almost wanted to say but it all worked out. It hadn't though. It really hadn't.

Philippa wanted to be a nurse. She made her money at the time taking the three buses or walking a few miles to the tube or the two buses and walking to the dance academy. At first it was only to practice but someone had handed her money and suggested she play for the students and she hadn't said anything. She took the money and played and she got paid to practice. She was allowed to use the piano in between classes to work on her own study unbothered but occasionally students would offer a small bribe for her to play during their warm-ups with the understanding that Philippa could play whatever she wanted and was working on her own study. They never seemed to mind and it was a break from the same music they heard in their classes and practice.

She got home one day and finally asked grandpa where Dorcas was. He did not know.

"Why isn't she home with us?"

He did not know.

"Was she really going to school all that time?", he nodded. "It's a real school?"

"Yes."

"But its summer…"

"I understand-"

"Well, is she alright? Is she safe?"

"I believe so. She's fine."

"How do you know?"

"She wrote a letter."

"Did she write me a letter?"

"I'm not sure, maybe yours was lost in the post but she told me to tell you she's fine."

"You told me that already."

Dorcas did not go home for a very long time. Of all the realizations she had when she was stuck in a cottage by the beach it never crossed her mind to just go home. She had not one, not two but several more people she could have gone to to discuss any of this with. She could have gone back to Hogwarts. She could have spoken to grandpa, she could have talked to Heidi or professor Mulgrave, Mcgonagall or Dumbledore or any number of her Ravenclaw peers, several in Hufflepuff would have listened or offered she stay with them. There were a few students in Gryffindor who would have done the same and for sure one Slytherin: Lydia but Dorcas could only imagine as far as the end of summer and then the end of autumn and then winter and spring and the world that she'd come from imploded into the walls of her new, cozier but cold and sad place by the wide, shushing ocean.

None of the letters she sent grandpa had a return address and this ensured also that he couldn't have come to look for her which some part of her must have known. He would have so it was a surprise when she arrived back from the beach, wobbly from a long swim to the hoot of an owl in daylight circling overhead. When it dropped down closer, she recognized it immediately. Lydia's black tipped feather owl looked very sophisticated and put upon for having to wet its feathers in the salty, damp air and perch on anything not made of pure gold but Dorcas opened the door and it found a place on the windowsill and looked around trying not to be rude. Dorcas untied the slip of parchment from its leg.

"Sorry, no-" and before she could say 'snacks', the owl was already half way back to the warm, heated perch of the Fawley family owlery where it lived in the lap of pure luxury of an exceedingly wealthy wizard family who preferred to use phones and mail as correspondence instead of owls.

Dorcas read the letter over and over and contemplated moving in. She decided against it. It was by chance as she went to rip the parchment that she read the ps message that had originally obscured the message in the folds. 'Just use your poppy paper money.' Of course! She hadn't thought of it. She couldn't pay her way with muggles but she could with Lydia.

The next day the owl was back. Dorcas couldn't have known that it was given a stern talking to. It was on strict orders to not return without an answer. The owl, thankfully it thought, didn't have to wait long. It had hatched a plan that it would roost in her hair if she didn't make it quick just to prove a point but Dorcas scribbled a message and he could be off and away. The sooner the plans were finalized, the sooner he wouldn't have to go back and forth. He looked over her shoulder as she wrote out a longer letter after nipping at her finger and hopping on the letter so he could read it himself. The original only contained a single word answer, the word 'yes' but that would absolutely not do. He hated the beach as much as Dorcas loved it and it was even worse because Dorcas told him she didn't know how to fish. What kind of nonsense? Who lives at the beach and can't catch themselves fish? What a terrible host! No matter, she was lucky that he wasn't sure if he even liked fish. She wrote out a longer reply around the yes she'd written in the center and around the note Lydia had written. She passed the parchment to the owl and he looked over it. Good enough. Everything was finalized in three more letters and Dorcas moved in two months later and the owl lived to its older than natural age hunting down fat juicy mice and sparingly being called to deliver letters to other boring witches and wizards occasionally proofreading their dull business related correspondence.

"If the Fawley owls are this strict about their work, no wonder the family was doing so well!", it had heard someone remark offhanded.

He beamed with joy momentarily and remembered that it would rather not be there even if he and his family were being complimented. He gave a hoot of derision and stuck out his leg pointedly, impatient to carry the message away as it had with Dorcas.