The warm spring breeze floated in the open kitchen window, bringing with it the salty air I had become accustomed to. I took a deep breath in through the nose and enjoyed it.

"That smells amazing," Rob said, sitting on the other side of the breakfast bar, as I lifted a bubbling cherry pie out of the oven and placed it on the stove top to cool. I placed another pie in the oven and admired my handy-work. I had never done a lattice-topped pie on my own before, but this one was adequate. An even, golden color adorned the crust, thanks to the egg wash I'd carefully brushed upon it.

"Well, I would wait until you get home to eat it or your tongue will be scalded for a week," I warned, refilling his cup of coffee and pouring my own. "Molly's crust recipe though."

"You two are getting on better these days, yeah?" he asked, picking at the fruit platter I'd set out for breakfast as he idly read the previous day's Quidditch scores. He usually came over for a bit on Saturday mornings. I enjoyed my brother's company.

"Thankfully," I sighed, taking a seat next to my brother. Things with Molly had been touch and go for awhile, though when I'd been presented with my own Christmas jumper, I knew we'd turned a corner. I had Bill and Fleur to thank for that, especially. "No reason for tension these days."

"Feels like forever ago," he said.

I nodded, taking in the morning. It was a beautiful, sunny Saturday in late Spring. "Hard to believe it's just been a year."

"Impossible."

I got up, antsy. I was waiting for a parcel to be delivered, and wouldn't be able to still myself until then. I wiped a few stray crumbs off the counter, checked on my pie, double checked everything was right in the fridge. One of the two cats we had adopted after Christmas, a sleek black cat named Solvi, rubbed against my legs, and I topped up her dish of dry food. Her fluffy orange companion Hemming was asleep on the back of the couch, curled up in a tight circle.

I moved on to the sitting area at the front of the house, fluffing the pillows that sat on the large gray sectional, but careful not to disturb the slumbering cat. Harry and I had thoughtfully decorated the place, knowing we wanted to make our home a reminder of how full our lives were. I stopped at the gallery wall we'd worked on filling out over the course of the year: framing the view from our terrace in Porto, from when we'd spent last June there. Photos from our post-Christmas trip to Thailand. Photos of our families, of our friends, of Teddy, who we saw at least weekly. It all made my heart swell, though I stopped when I came upon the picture of Adam and myself, taken what felt like decades ago now.

I missed him deeply. I'd spent a lot of the last year mourning my first love, the duality of who he was, faults and all, but also the future he would never get to live. I sighed, wiping a speck of dust off the frame, before I realized my brother was watching me. But I knew he understood.

We'd taken our time in naming our dwelling, though what started out as a joke made my Ron, had stuck. The first time he saw the house, once we'd painted and spruced things up, he said it was as if we were a ship that had finally docked. And thus, Docked Cottage, usually shortened to DockCot, was born. And it was our refuge from the world.

There was a large thud against the side of the house upstairs, on the side where our bedroom was. "The hell?"

"Are you all right?" I called up the stairs to Harry, having let him sleep in after he'd had a busy week.

"Damn owls," he shouted back, and I knew he had my parcel. I could hear him fussing, his feet shifting on the floorboards overhead. "I'll be right down."

"Are you nervous?" Rob called, though he already knew the answer as he watched me shift my weight from one foot to the other. I waved him off. Hemming had been woken up by the commotion and I watched him stretch before settling back down to sleep.

I stood at the base of the stairs, until Harry appeared, holding a parcel that was rectangular and about a foot long. It was wrapped in thick, black paper, tied with twine, and had "PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL. NOT TO BE OPENED BY ANYONE OTHER THAN KATHERINE HAMMOND." scrawled across the side.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," I said, taking it from him eagerly. "Coffee's fresh."

"Morning, Rob," Harry nodded, as I pulled the twine undone and got my finger under the paper. They had made it quite hard to open, and I struggled for awhile, both Harry and Rob watching intently. Finally, with the help of a kitchen knife, I'd freed the product of many, many hours of my labor.

I held up the cover of the first book on the stack, feeling a surge of pride in my chest. Harry had read loads of sections and revisions as I spent the better part of the five months writing it, and now it was finally real, in my hands, and available for sale to the public on Monday.

Rob reached for it, and I passed it to him. "Our Story," he said aloud. "Excerpts from the Journey to Bring Down Voldemort by Katherine Hammond, with Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ronald Weasley."

It was a joint project, really, though my friends and Harry had declined any roll in the true authorship of the piece. I'd found the work rather helpful, actually. It had kept me busy and allowed me the space to process everything.

After our return from Portugal in June, Hermione and I had consulted with the Ministry of Magic, giving them all the data we had amassed. Her preparations and stores, my potions, food logs, and the track of our movements: everything was carefully documented. We had spent many hours together in the Archives, working with Aurors and administrators alike, before wrapping up in time to send Hermione off to Hogwarts in September.

She was the only one of us that decided to finish her education and take her N.E.W.T.s. I questioned her decision sometimes, and wondered how she could manage to be away from Ron. Ron had stayed with us off and on, whenever his mother drove him too crazy, though he rented them a proper flat once a steady paycheck from Auror training started coming in.

Amongst this, we all found our ways to cope, whether it was schoolwork or newfound jobs. I had pursued therapy to help me process the emotions I found wanting to exude from every pore in my body. Grief had bubbled up in me like a potion overflowing, and therapy was the perfect place to relieve myself of the overflow.

At the same time, another thing was brewing: the media's hysteria for more. They wanted more information about us. About our travels, about what we knew about Voldemort, about our personal lives, really, they wanted any little morsel of information they could get their hands on. There were plenty of people willing to drop tidbits of false information, wanting their place in the papers, and it was becoming out-of-control. We couldn't ignore it anymore.

Just like the late morning last May when we had discussed how to address the media, that fall we had gathered, in Hogsmeade, just after Hermione arrived at Hogwarts. Over mugs of butterbeer, we jointly decided something written was the way to go once more. Except we knew this time, a statement wouldn't bring peace to our lives. But, something of more substance probably would.

I'd found an agent who was willing to work with the story despite the boundaries we'd all agreed upon, and we got to work. I compiled some carefully curated details I'd taken from all my journals, and strung it together into a book. It was a behemoth of a project, that included many rounds of edits to assure no classified information would be released.

I had sat down with Harry, Ron, and Hermione separately, to talk about what pieces of information they wanted to emphasize, wanted to obscure, or even leave out. In the end, it was a three hundred page book, and now, anyone would be able to read it, and get a glance at our lives.

I had handed in our first draft just before Christmas, before our trip to Thailand. While our indulgence in Porto was restorative, we found ourselves restless, and went off in search of warmer weather and simple pleasures. That was the easy answer, of course.

Really, we were running from errant emotions we had both tried to deal with, in therapy, in immersing ourselves into projects, and also outright tried to extinguish. The piercing stab of grief was relentless though, and I was beginning to think we might always be tempted to run from what haunted us.

I'd spent the first few months of the year doing round after round of edits, so many that at one point there had been paper on every surface in the living room while I got things straight. And finally, I'd handed in the final draft two months ago. The Daily Prophet had released a few snippets, to drum up excitement for it, although the number of pre-ordered copies had grown so large I stopped checking weeks ago.

"I want mine signed," Rob declared.

"C'mon," I whined, between bites of the red grapes I was eating out of the fruit bowl that sat on the counter. "That's silly."

"It is not," he said.

I huffed, but took the book from his hands and grabbed a quill and pot of ink. I held the book in my hands for a moment, searching my mind for the perfect thing to write. When I thought I had it, I flipped to the title page.

I dipped my quill in the pot of dark ink, waited for it to drip off, and wrote.

To Rob-

Thank you for always having my back, in battles (and in life).

And then I scribbled my name below. I blew lightly on it, to make it dry faster, as Rob and Harry watched me expectantly.

"Well?" Rob asked, tipping back the rest of his coffee.

I closed the book and handed it to him. "Now, go on, haven't you got somewhere to be?"

Rob feigned offense, though he did leave around that time each week. "I'll have you know, I'm leaving because I have somewhere to be, and not because you're pushing me out."

"Take a book for Dad?" I asked, handing him another. "You'll see him before I will."

"Kat, come on," Rob said to me. "When your daughter writes a book that makes the front page of the Daily Prophet, multiple times, do you really want to receive the hard copy of it from your lowly, Auror of a son?"

"Oh, shut up," I sighed, to Harry's amusement. I set the book meant for my father down on the kitchen counter. "Fine. I'll deliver it myself."

"He'll be delighted," Rob said. "Now I'm leaving."

I packed up the spare pie to send along with him, as it had cooled. Then, I said my goodbyes to him, and Harry saw him out.

I poured myself another cup of coffee, and sat on the couch with the book. I just wanted to look at it. It had been in process for so long, it was a little unreal to hold it in my hands. I flipped through it, not stopping long enough to read more than a phrase or two at a time. It was all familiar to me, all had come out of my brain at one point or another. But it felt so different to see the thoughts bound in a book as opposed to hastily scribbled in my journals.

Harry came back to what must have been an interesting sight, as I held the book in my hand, thumbing through the pages.

He grabbed one of the top of the pile, and sat next to me on the couch. "Think we'll finally be able to wander down Diagon Alley in peace?"

"Well," she said, pausing. "It might be a step in the right direction. Things are starting to ease up."

"They are," he said. "Thank you for taking this on, Kat. I'm really happy with it, and I don't think anyone could have captured this as accurately as you did, while still keeping the more intimate things between us."

I smiled and leaned into him, pressing my lip against his. It was easy to get caught up in a quick snog on our couch, our bodies pressed together, but we were interrupted by the ring of the kitchen timer I'd set for the pie. He groaned as I pulled away from him. "I can't burn the pie!"

It was perfectly golden and bubbling, the smell wafting across the open living space.

"You're not going to let me have any of that until Ron and Hermione get here, are you?" he asked, though his tone was playful.

"I did not spend three hours learning how to make the perfect crust with Molly only to present a pie with a slice taken out of it for our picnic," I said. "But I do have quiche in the fridge if you're hungry."

He nodded, and I heated it up for him. It was kind of amazing how much food we were going through while he was in Auror training, but I made sure there was always something for him to eat in the fridge.

"Feels like we haven't seen them in ages," I said, reading the paper while Harry ate next to me. My eyes scanned the job postings. I'd been hard at work writing and consulting on the book, and while that meant my bank account was healthy, I refused to sit around the cottage all day. I'd had an offer from St. Mungo's compounding pharmacy to work on some research they were doing on potion bioavailability, but was contemplating if I felt confident enough in my potion skills to dive back in after two years away or if I wanted to keep writing. The work was definitely there for me if I wanted it, and it was tempting. Harry did not pressure me into deciding, and I figured I would know when the time was right, and the job was right.

"Hermione's graduation," he said, between bites of quiche. They'd gone to Spain on a holiday as soon as Hermione finished school, and I didn't blame them at all. I hoped they would return as tan and happy and carefree as they had appeared on the postcard they'd sent us. It was stuck on the fridge by a magnet. "And if all went well..."

I nodded, a smile spreading across my face. Before they'd departed for their trip to Spain, Ron had showed us the modest ring he'd bought for Hermione and shared his plans to propose with it. I knew many people would look to us, and wonder if we would be next, or when that would happen for us. But I was wholeheartedly happy for my friends, and I wanted them to have their moment, and we would get to that stage when we were good and ready. But, not yet.

"It should be quite a joyous occasion," Harry finished his thought as he swallowed the last bite of his breakfast.

"Well, I've got a bottle of champagne chilling and lots of food prepared," I said, opening the fridge once more. "I've got fruit salad, with watermelon and strawberries and fresh pineapple and grapes, kebabs marinating-"

"The pie," he said, eyeing it again. I moved it further out of his reach and smiled at him. "I've no doubt you've got plenty of food there for us all."

He put his cleared plate in the sink, charming it to wash itself and the few dirty utensils I'd tossed in earlier. "Help me get the table set up?"

He nodded and we walked out the back door of the house. We were only a couple hundred feet from the sea, though the walk was steep to get down to the beach. Instead, Harry and I often watched the sun rise or set, sitting with our feet dangling off the edge of the bluff, usually a mug of coffee or glass of wine in hand, depending on the time of day. We had a small patio just outside the door, and with some of the money from the book's advance, I ordered us a table to enjoy during the warmer months.

I swept errant sand off the patio, despite knowing more would just collect in the grooves between the bricks, while Harry got the table and umbrella set up. I had only ordered four chairs, because I couldn't picture us having more than two guests, though I questioned it now that I saw it set up and how much room there was.

"This looks lovely," he said, admiring his handiwork and the mosaic top of the table. "I think we'll get a good amount of use out of this."

"I hope so," I said, joining him. He wrapped an arm around my waist, pulling me close to him. I took a deep breath, enjoying the scent of the sea mingling with the smell of his tea tree shampoo.

"The book is done," he said. "Our house is done-"

"It's in good shape," I clarified. "I'm not sure it will ever be done. I want to redo that upstairs bathroom and maybe put a walk-in closet in our room-."

"Humor me?" he asked, his eyes full of amusement.

"Yes, fine," I sighed. "Our house is mostly done."

"You make this a very happy place to come home too each night, Kat," he said. "You are here, and there is always plenty of food, and a cup of tea when I'm not hungry, and supportive silence when I don't feel like talking. A roaring fire and a blanket when it's chilly and the windows cracked when it's warm, and the cats, which are great, and you somehow always know what I need. Usually before I know."

I nodded. "I'm happy here."

"I just think about how two years ago I had no idea I wanted this," he said. "And then I think about how a year ago I never thought I would get this. And now… I have it. And I think I'm the luckiest man on earth."

"You make me feel lucky too," I whispered into his ear. "This isn't what I thought my future would be like."

He chuckled, and I knew for a moment we both got a little lost in our own minds as we considered where we thought we would be. I thought I would certainly be working in a musty potion brewing job somewhere. I didn't foresee getting swept into writing a book on our crazy adventure, nor living in the beachside cottage, nor falling in love with Harry, even.

"It's better than I imagined," I said.

"I think so too," he admitted.

We both enjoyed the feeling of that warm morning, the sun beating down on our backs, heating us up in the way that made us want to lay out and nap. In the distance, the sound of the waves breaking against the shore, one after another lulled us further into content. Harry was right, this was a happy place. Despite all the pains we carried around with us, we had crafted a dwelling unlike any either of us had enjoyed before. It was a place of safety and growth and peace.

I knew that we would wrestle with certain demons for the rest of our lives, but knowing we had this house, a place of refuge, and each other's unwavering support, I knew we could face anything. Together.

Author's Note: Well, here's the fluffy little Epilogue for Not Alone. I thought it would be the perfect update for Valentine's Day, so thank you for the extreme patience everyone has shown me while I finished this story. Thank you to everyone who has messaged me over the years, asking for me to finish this work, and thank you so much for the reviews on the latest few chapters. The tangible support of my readers means the world to me. I'm glad to announce that this story is now complete! If you're looking for something new to read, I think you'll enjoy my latest story, Gravity, which has a new chapter coming out tomorrow.