It took Hermione several weeks to grasp that things were over between her and Draco. She thought at first that he was merely busy, as he had claimed. Even when she finally began to sense that he was avoiding her, she was still in doubt—she could not understand what had changed. Surely he wouldn't just disappear from her life, without so much as a warning. She was unable to accept that what they had shared had been so meaningless that he didn't even feel the need to do her the courtesy of actually ending it.

And then again, she realized with a sinking feeling of despair, what was there to end? They had not once discussed what they were. You can't lose something that was never yours.

For all she'd thought she'd learned about Malfoy, it turned out she didn't know him any better now than she had before. In fact, she felt as though she knew less; before, she had mistakenly thought that she had him all figured out. Now, she knew she would never understand him.

Hermione was devastated, of course, but had too much pride to confront him about it—to even ask him what had happened. She clearly meant nothing to him; why reveal that he meant anything to her? The last thing she wanted was his pity.

So now, when she woke up in the mornings, heartbroken and puffy-eyed from crying into her pillow the night before, she stood at her bathroom mirror for as long as it took to hide her misery. No longer was she too tired to care what others thought. Each day, as she applied her makeup, Hermione swore to herself that she would never let him see how much he'd hurt her.

"So I heard that project you and Malfoy worked on turned out to be a pretty big deal," said Ginny, leaning excitedly over the dinner table. "Harry told me there's been rampant talk of promotions for both of you."

Hermione smiled politely and took a sip of her wine. It was the first time that she and Ginny had caught up alone since she had called off her engagement with Ron, and though she had been terrified that Ginny might still harbor some resentment against her for having broken her brother's heart, things had gone smoothly so far.

"Anyway, I'm so glad all your hard work has finally paid off."

"I haven't even been promoted yet," Hermione protested, but Ginny went on.

"Especially having to work with Malfoy all those hours—Harry told me everything. I can't imagine how much you must have suffered. By the way, did you know that he's dating Fleur's little sister? Fleur just told me about it last week, and I was absolutely shocked."

Hermione felt every muscle in her body go completely still. "No, I didn't."

"Can you believe it? Gabrielle Delacour. I thought she had more sense than that."

"I don't really keep track of Malfoy's personal affairs," Hermione lied, as casually as she could muster.

"Well, apparently he's a total arsehole to her, which is hardly a surprise. She complained to Fleur that he treats her like a trophy and seems to have no interest whatsoever in an actual relationship. His parents had a party at the Manor last week, and he took Gabby as his date, but he barely spoke to her once the entire time."

Jealousy swelled in her heart like an ugly, infected wound, and she felt as though she might burst. He was taking Gabrielle, whom he could not have dated long, out and about in public; he was showing her off at his parents' parties. Hermione felt more than ever the full weight of her nothingness. "That sounds like him," she said, as airily as she could.

"I just don't understand why she would ever want to date him. Do you think it's the money?"

"Who knows?" asked Hermione, desperately trying to suppress the ache that was steadily building inside her chest.

"The worst part is, Fleur told me she thinks it's because of the Veela thing that he's so awful to her. She said Narcissa made sure to bring it up more than once that night."

"The Veela thing?"

"You know, they're a quarter Veela. Apparently the Malfoys think that's embarrassing," said Ginny, rolling her eyes. "But the Delacours are a very important family in France—wizarding aristocracy and whatnot—so I suppose the pureblood pedigree makes up for that little blemish."

Pureblood.

Of course.

And then it was not an ache, but something much more—a burning sensation that erupted inside of her, stinging her skin and melting her helpless bones—and it could not be ignored, and it could not be willed away. Soon nothing would remain of her but ash. The pain was overwhelming, but Ginny did not notice; she was still talking—and Hermione was very still, because it hurt too much to move.

Ginny mistook her silence for disgust and anger at the Malfoys' bigotry, and she reached out to take Hermione's hand.

"I know. It's insulting how little they've changed. You'd think they'd have learned something, especially since they'd all be in Azkaban right now if it weren't for Harry. Sometimes I think he shouldn't have testified on Narcissa's behalf after all."

"Harry's a bleeding heart," Hermione said, hastily changing the subject. "He tries to hide it, but he looks for the best in people." She wondered, as she spoke, if her voice betrayed any of the immobilizing pain that was shattering her already broken heart.

Draco's days were soaked in regret.

He had not been able to date a single girl since he had first kissed Hermione. He had tried—he had gone on several dates with a few acceptable pureblood prospects, including Gabrielle Delacour, and he had slept with a girl once as a distraction. But none of it worked. She was under his skin, and it seemed there was nothing he could do to erase her memory.

He spent entire nights awake, fighting the urge to Apparate to her apartment. He knew he needed to stay away, that nothing had changed. But the darkness of night seemed to somehow diminish the importance of all the obstacles that stood between them, and he was forced to lie in bed and remind himself of all the reasons he had ended things in the first place. It got worse when he heard a rumor that she was dating Terry Boot: though he tried not to let it bother him, he could not stop himself from agonizing over it.

Draco began to live for the moments when he ran into her at the Ministry. A silent ride in the lift, shared with a couple strangers; a stolen glance across the lobby; an inter-department meeting spent sitting across from one another—these were the pitiful encounters he came to prize above all else. He spent weeks waiting for them, thinking about them. When there were not enough, he began to plan them—he knew her schedule, and these little brushes were easily arranged. But no matter how pathetically he labored to plot such chance encounters, he never used them to speak to her or do anything more than pretend fiercely to ignore her.

When he was eventually sent to her department to get an International Creature Transfer form signed, he felt a small thrill at the chance to see her. On his way to the conference room, where his contact was waiting, he snuck a furtive peek into her office, but she was not there. Disappointed, he continued on to the conference room and opened the door to enter.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

Hermione stared up at him from the conference table, equally still. The quill she had been playing with as she waited was now dangling from her fingers in mid-air, like an unfinished melody.

"I didn't know you handled creature transfers," he blurted out.

"I don't. I'm covering for Peter."

Draco entered the room and put the forms down gingerly on the table between them. Unable to bring himself to meet her eyes, he was silent as she reached for the parchment and wordlessly began to fill it out. He wished he had known it would be her. It was the first time they had spoken since their final night together; and he would have wanted to plan for it, to think of things to say. Instead, he had been caught so off guard that he could barely breathe properly, let alone string together a sentence.

"Do you need me to sign off on all of these?" she asked quietly.

Draco summoned the courage to glance at her. "Yes, please."

Hermione looked back at him with an arched eyebrow. "I didn't know please was in the Malfoy vocabulary," she said frostily, before turning back to the parchment in front of her. He wanted desperately to ask her if she was still seeing Boot, but he knew he had no right to ask—and she would most likely tell him so herself—so he bit his tongue.

After some time, her voice finally pierced the heavy silence. "You must be very pleased with yourself." Her tone could have cut steel.

Draco was so lost in his thoughts that he was completely unprepared for her sudden attempt at conversation. "Sorry?"

"You must be very pleased with yourself," Hermione repeated bitterly, jamming her quill so viciously onto the forms as she wrote that Draco feared she might stab holes in the parchment. When he did not respond, still thoroughly confused, she finally looked up and rolled her eyes at him. "I heard you've been nominated to serve as a Junior Representative to the ICW."

"Oh," Draco responded with sudden understanding. "Um, yes. They put me on the list."

"Congratulations," Hermione said calmly, having already returned to the forms.

"It's really thanks to you, you know. It would never have happened without the Creatures proposals."

"Don't be so modest, Draco." Her voice trembled slightly as she continued to write furiously. "It's not your color."

"My color?"

"It doesn't suit you."

He was silent. The only sound in the room for several minutes was her quill scratching angrily across parchment, betraying the emotion behind her icy demeanor.

Then, without warning, she suddenly stopped writing and looked up at him. He had been staring blankly at the table, and his head jerked up at her sudden movement. For a moment, the two gaped at each other in silence, both seemingly searching for something. And then, as if on cue, both turned away—she lowered her gaze to the parchment before her, and he suddenly found the paint on the far wall mesmerizing.

When she was finally finished filling out the forms, she rose abruptly, and he followed. She put them neatly in order and held them out to him without meeting his eyes, and he hesitated to take them. There was so much he wanted to say to her, so much he needed her to know. Who knew when he would have an opportunity like this again? But then, he had come this far; it would be a waste to suddenly, at this point, demolish the dam he had struggled to build. And yet—a nagging little voice in the back of his mind asked him—what would be the harm in telling her now? It was over anyway. Perhaps he would sleep better at night if she knew.

As he stood there, frozen, without accepting the forms, her eyes rose to meet his, and he drew in a sharp breath. "Hermione—"

"I really should be getting back to work," she said stiffly, looking away from him.

He still did not take the forms. His chest felt suddenly hollow, and a great wave of pressure threatened to come crashing down on his throat. Blinking fiercely, he finally reached out for the parchment she was handing him.

"All right," he said hoarsely. "Thank you."

She did not leave immediately. "I hope you get it," she said quietly, before turning towards the door. It was typical of her—to be kind even as she was angry.

"I hope I don't," he replied, just as softly. His eyes were glued to the floor.

"Why not?"

"Because," he choked out, "if I got the job," and the rest he said in barely a whisper, "I wouldn't run into you like this anymore."

She paused for only a second—and he did not look to see her reaction—before leaving the room and slamming the door shut behind her.

The next day, Draco was awarded the position of Junior Representative of England at the International Confederation of Wizards. The announcement was a media-heavy affair, and after many posed smiles and handshakes, he retreated to his office in the International Law division for what would be the last time.

Leaning back in his chair, he loosened his tie and willed himself to be happy. The job had been his dream since starting at the Ministry. It was the only thing he could remember wanting in the past several years—but that, he admitted to himself, was a lie; he could most certainly think of one other thing he had wanted, perhaps even more desperately.

In fact, that was all he could think of right now. He tried not to think of the day before and how he had embarrassingly declared his feelings for the girl who now hated him (yet again), right before she stormed out on him. It was humiliating, really, and so unlike him that he could barely believe it had actually happened.

And worse, what he had said was true. Despite his long-lived hunger for the job at the ICW, he found, to his horror, that he no longer wanted it. He knew what it meant: that he would no longer be in England most of the time, that he would travel constantly and rarely find himself in his new office at the Ministry. He knew that he would hardly ever see her again.

Isn't that what he had wanted all along?

No, he suddenly wanted to scream, it was never my choice to make.

But that, too, was a lie, and he knew it. He picked up the crystal dragon-shaped paperweight on his desk and flung it across the room, where it shattered with a resounding crash.

The conference room was the last time they spoke alone.

When Draco returned temporarily from his first Confederation Assembly, Hermione was engaged again, and she no longer worked for the Department of Magical Creatures. Her life had moved so quickly while he was gone that he found himself wondering, in amazement, how his awkward and pathetic confession could have had no effect on her whatsoever. While he was away, he had somehow developed the delusion that Hermione would be waiting for him back home with bated breath—that, touched by his tender admission, she would have been unable to think of anything else; that she would have cursed how quickly he had had to leave England behind (preventing her from seeing him for months); that she would have anxiously counted the days until she could finally confront him about what it had all meant.

He had agonized countless times in Paris over what to tell her—in cafés, in his family's pied-à-terre apartment, in his seat at the Confederation Assembly—and he had never reached a conclusive answer. He could never marry her; that had not changed. Surely she had known that all along. But he could also no longer imagine living a life without her in it. His days in Paris had been easy compared to the hell he went through in London, knowing that she was always within reach and yet far away. In France, the physical distance between them had given him comfort—it had enabled him to cling to the illusion that the Channel was all that separated them.

Coming home served as a cold reminder that that was not the case.

He saw her once in the Ministry lobby from afar, her microscopic disgrace of an engagement ring locked firmly around her finger. If Weasley had kept it all along, Draco realized, he must never have given up hope. All that time, Weasley must have known he'd be able to win her back.

With the thought came a sinking feeling in his stomach: Hermione had never truly been his.

Draco might have approached her, but she was with Potter. Her eyes were dark and deep and focused, the way they always looked when she was lost in conversation, and she was chatting away so enthusiastically that she took no notice of him. She had cropped her unmanageable hair short, which didn't suit her (only she would get a haircut like that right before a wedding, he thought to himself bitterly), and she looked thinner than before. Now that she could no longer pin her hair back, it kept falling in her face, and she had to continually brush strands of it out of her eyes as she talked. She did not look happy, Draco thought, but that might have been his imagination—after all, he would have given anything to believe that that was true.

Once she and Potter had Flooed out of the building, Draco emerged from the shadows and stood alone in the lobby, feeling farther from her than he ever had before.

He drank himself into oblivion the day she married Weasley. After spending a week wallowing in his drunken misery and staring at her smiling photo in the newspaper, he stormed into his parents' manor and demanded that they set him up with a suitable witch.

"What's gotten into you?" his mother asked, bewildered, but he gave no answer. He wanted to get married, he said, and he wanted to do it now.

His parents did not squander the opportunity to find him an ideal witch. They chose to introduce him to Astoria Greengrass, a pureblooded Slytherin with no Death Eater ties. Draco was married within the year.