The silence inside the abandoned cottage was absolute, a vacuum where a life had existed only hours before. Hermione stood before the antique writing desk in the corner of the small living room. Her wand hand was steady, but her breath came in shallow, ragged hitches.
The desk surface was bare. Cho Chang had been thorough—paranoid, even. She had magically scoured the wood, removing dust, fingerprints, and ink stains. To the naked eye, and even to standard Auror detection spells, it was a clean slate.
But Hermione Granger did not rely on standard spells. She relied on the fundamental laws of magical physics: nothing is ever truly gone; it is merely imprinted.
She reached into her robes and pulled out a small vial of Revealing Dust—a rare, shimmering powder ground from the shells of Time-Turner hourglasses. She sprinkled it over the wooden surface of the desk.
"Vestigium Scripta Manet," she whispered, the incantation vibrating with the force of her will. The trace of writing remains.
It was a piece of forensic magic so advanced it bordered on necromancy of the inanimate. The dust began to glow, sinking into the grain of the wood, fighting against the heavy concealment charms Cho had layered into the desk. It sought out the microscopic compressions where a quill had pressed down years ago.
For a moment, nothing happened. Cho's counter-magic was immense, a wall of static refusing to yield the past. But Hermione pushed more power into her wand, her desperation fueling the spell. The wood groaned, the magical pressure building until the air in the room smelled of ozone.
Slowly, agonizingly, lines of ghostly, silver light began to force their way through the resistance. They twisted and writhed, trying to form sentences, but Cho's erasure spells were shattering the reconstruction.
Hermione gasped, sweat beading on her forehead. She couldn't hold the whole letter. It was disintegrating before her eyes. She focused all her will on the center of the desk, where the pressure of the quill had been heaviest—the heart of the message.
The silver light flared, solidifying into a single, fragmented paragraph floating in the dark air. The handwriting was unmistakable. Bold. Hurried. Harry's.
She read the glowing words, and her world ended.
...Lucien. Our son... He is pure Potter, Cho. Stronger than anything I've ever seen... The potion I left you... it will hide him.
The silver light flickered and died, the spell exhausted. The rest of the letter—the explanations, the talk of timelines, the mention of Dumbledore—remained buried in the grain, lost to the silence.
Hermione stood frozen in the darkness.
She replayed the words in her mind, over and over.
Our son.Pure Potter.The potion I left you... it will hide him.
There was no talk of sacrifice. No talk of being forced. In the vacuum of context, the words stripped bare of their tragic origins looked like something else entirely: Management.
It looked like Harry Potter, the Savior, had discovered he had a child with Cho Chang—a child who was "stronger than anything"—and instead of claiming him, instead of loving him, he had given Cho a potion to suppress the boy and hide him.
"You hid him," Hermione whispered to the empty room, her voice trembling with a rage she had never felt before. "You found out he was powerful, and you buried him."
She looked to the bottom of the desk, where the signature had been. It flared briefly, one last spark of silver dust.
'H'
She let out a choked sob. She looked at the empty space where the photo had been. Cho had taken the face, but Harry had left the evidence.
She couldn't stay here. The cottage felt suffocating, filled with the echoes of a cold, calculated arrangement. She needed to scream. She needed to break something.
She needed Ron.
The Apparition to the Burrow was jagged and dangerous. Hermione landed hard in the tall, overgrown grass of the orchard, stumbling to her knees. The smell of wet earth and rotting apples—usually a comfort—felt cloying tonight.
She cast her Patronus, her hand shaking. The silver otter swam through the wall of the crooked house. Orchard. Alone. Now.
Moments later, the back door banged open. Ron Weasley came running out, wand drawn, wearing a knitted maroon jumper over his pyjamas. He spotted her huddled form and sprinted through the damp grass.
"Hermione?" he called, panic in his voice. "Mione! What is it? Are you hurt?"
He dropped to his knees beside her, reaching out. Hermione collapsed into him, clutching the wool of his jumper as if it were the only solid thing left in the universe.
"I found it," she gasped, her face buried in his chest. "I found the truth, Ron. It's worse than we thought."
"What?" Ron pulled back, gripping her shoulders, his eyes searching her tear-streaked face. "What did you find? Is it the Riddle girl?"
"No," Hermione choked out. "The boy. Lucien. I went to the cottage, Ron. Cho's cottage. It was empty. But I used the dust. I reconstructed part of a letter."
She took a shuddering breath, looking Ron dead in the eye. "A letter from the father. From 'H'."
Ron stared at her. "H? Who's H?"
"It was Harry's handwriting, Ron," Hermione cried, her voice cracking. "I know his scrawl. I know the pressure he puts on the quill. It was him. It was Harry."
Ron recoiled as if she'd slapped him. "Don't be daft. Harry wrote to Cho? About what?"
"About the boy," Hermione said, the words spilling out like poison. "I only got a few lines, Ron. Cho hid the rest. But I saw enough."
She gripped his arms, her nails digging in. "He wrote: 'Lucien. Our son... He is pure Potter... The potion I left you... it will hide him.'"
Ron stood up, backing away, shaking his head violently. "No. No way. Harry wouldn't hide a kid. He wouldn't."
"I saw the words!" Hermione stood too, shouting now, the hysteria bubbling over. "He called him 'pure Potter'. He said he was 'stronger than anything he'd seen'. And then he gave Cho a potion to hide him! To suppress him!"
"Maybe..." Ron stammered, looking sick. "Maybe he was protecting him? From the Death Eaters? From the fame?"
"He abandoned them, Ron!" Hermione wept. "He gave her a potion and left! He left Cho to drug his son for fifteen years! And he never told us. He never told Ginny. He just... washed his hands of it."
She grabbed Ron's arm again. "And now Lysander Grindelwald has him. Grindelwald's son has Harry's secret, powerful son. The son Harry tried to bury."
Ron stood rooted to the spot. The shock was slowly giving way to a profound, sickening realization. If Hermione was right—and she was always right about evidence—then Harry hadn't just made a mistake. He had committed a cold-blooded act of containment.
"He lied to us," Ron whispered, his voice trembling. "All this time. We're his family. And he looked us in the face..."
"We have to find him," Hermione said, wiping her face, her voice steeling into something hard and brittle. "We can't use the Ministry. If this gets out, it destroys everything. Harry kept this secret to protect his reputation, or the timeline, or whatever excuse he has. But we have to protect the boy."
"Where is Harry?" Ron asked, his voice low and dangerous.
"The Balkans," Hermione said. "Deep cover operation. He's isolated."
"Then we go to the Balkans," Ron said firmly. "We pack our gear. We leave tonight."
He looked toward the house, toward where his sister was sleeping, unaware that her marriage was built on a foundation of secrets. He looked back at Hermione.
"I'm going to ask him," Ron said, his hands curling into fists. "I'm going to look him in the eye and ask him why he drugged his own son and left him in the woods. And if he doesn't have a damn good answer..."
"We save the boy, Ron," Hermione interrupted, gripping his hand. "That's the mission. We get Lucien back from Grindelwald. Even if we have to fight Harry to do it."
Ron nodded, squeezing her hand until her knuckles popped. "We save the boy."
They turned toward the house, united in their purpose, united in their grief, and united in their terrifying, absolute misunderstanding of the truth. They believed they were going to confront a father who had hidden a child out of fear or shame. They had no idea they were chasing the ghost of a man who had died to save them all, or that the letter Hermione had failed to fully read contained the only explanation that could have exonerated their best friend.