When he woke, late at night, and found her gone from their bed, he assumed one of the boys had had another nightmare, and he went back to sleep.
So when he went downstairs, early the next morning and in a hurry to get to work, he didn't comment on her tired eyes and sleepy lack of conversation.
He never quite realised that his beloved wife and mother of five was a different person from the still-grieving baby sister she'd never really let him see.
Molly Weasley worried about the boys, growing up in a world full of danger and unnamed threats. Molly Weasley worried about her husband, going off to work at the Ministry at all hours of the day and night, being pushed into jobs he wasn't trained for by a desperate government who knew, deep down, it was loosing this war. Molly Weasley worried about what would happen if the war were lost, and how her family would get by.
Molly Prewett knew exactly what happened when people tried to fight for what was right. Molly Prewett knew the war was as good as lost, really. Molly Prewett knew what happened to families when their heart and soul was snatched from beneath them.
Molly Prewett got up, sometimes, late at night, and left Molly Weasleys' husband behind. She'd slip downstairs and Apparate away from Molly Weasleys' kitchen, and appear a split-second later, on the cold and windswept hill that looked down on a lonely old house, sitting with all the shutters closed and the lights extinguished. She'd stand there for a long time, remembering the times when the house wasn't lonely, but filled with a couple, three hyperactive children, and an ever-changing assortment of pets. When it was filled to the brim with contented happiness.
Then she walks away, down the other side of the hill, following a winding track that she knows just as Molly Weasley knows the halls and stairways of the Burrow in the dark, and she stops at the bottom, when the path has led to a gate that stands open, as if waiting for her.
Inside are the graves of her ancestors, but she's concerned only with the two near-new headstones to her left. The two that are identical, even in death.
Molly Prewett stays for a while, in the darkness lit only by her wands' faint glow, which casts shadows across the grass and throws the names on the headstones into sharp relief. Molly Prewett cries for her brothers, and hopes that the war isn't lost, so that they didn't die for nothing. For a lost cause.
Molly Weasley knows that Gideon and Fabian Prewett are heroes, who died for a cause they believed in. Molly Weasley knows that Gideon and Fabian Prewett knew, deep down, that they would win this war. Molly Weasley has faith in them, and she knows that her little family will come through all right, in the end.
Molly Weasley was always home, come morning, because she knows that Gideon and Fabian would have come home, if they'd had even the slightest chance of making it.
Molly Prewett only remembers the absence.