"Is Dad angry with me?"
They sat at the new table with mugs of steaming tea—it had taken James a full day of unpacking to work up to asking the question.
His mother considered him for a long moment.
"He's not angry," she said, her voice gentle—careful in a way it usually wasn't. “He just doesn’t understand."
A small smile touched her lips.
"Part of the reason I fell in love with him was because he was gentle where other men were not. Because he believes so thoroughly in the good in the world and lives his life according to what he thinks is right. He is a romantic, Jamie. He believes in love more than anything else. He believes it is what makes us human."
For a moment she looked down at her tea.
"But he has never had to hide who he is out of fear. He has never been told he was wrong simply for existing. He has never had to conceal who he loves from the world. He will never understand the choices you made because he cannot. For him love has always been easy and so it’s hard for him to look past the lies and the people that were hurt."
James nodded and looked down into his cup, trying to ignore the sting behind his eyes.
“But I understand.”
The words were achingly gentle. James looked up then—
"I don’t know what happened between you and Regulus—I hope one day you’ll tell me but even if you don’t, I know enough to know that there is nothing more painful in this world than having to hide who you are and who you love. I know how much it hurts when the world thinks you’re wrong and unnatural. It hurts us in ways that make us do whatever we can to protect ourselves. And sometimes, in trying to protect ourselves, we end up hurting the people we love."
She gave him a sad smile.
"Can I tell you a story Sheru, it’s not a happy story but it’s one I think you should hear, one I wish I’d told you a long time ago."
James nodded.
"As you know," his mother began, "I was very young when I came to live with your Uncle Arjun."
James nodded again. He remembered his mother's older brother—not well; he had died when James was still very young. But he remembered the flash of white teeth whenever he smiled. Remembered kind eyes and a booming laugh.
"There were sixteen years between your uncle and I," his mother continued. "He'd already left for England by the time I was old enough to understand I had a brother—all I had of him were stories and photographs."
"Why did he leave?" James asked.
"The same reason everyone who could leave did in those days." She gave a small shrug. "Opportunity. Work. A future. So many people lost their lives, their homes—everything—after the Partition. Like so many others, my parents spent the rest of their lives trying to rebuild what they'd'd lost after the border was drawn. Life was hard, even for families like mine. Then one day, just after I had turned seven, there was a dragon pox outbreak. It happened very quickly. My father died first. My mother followed days later. One day I had parents, a home, and friends. Next, I was standing in the Ministry with just a single suitcase of clothes, with people talking to me in a language I didn’t understand—waiting for a brother I didn’t know."
She shook her head.
"Poor Arjun. He was twenty-three years old. Not prepared to become a parent, especially to a child who had just lost both of hers. But he tried. Merlin, he tried."
James stared at his mother, surprise and curiosity momentarily eclipsing the emotions that had been threatening to overwhelm him only minutes before.
Effy had never been the storyteller in the family. That had always been his father. Every story James knew about her had come through him: how they'd met, after she'd been the healer on call when his father had landed himself in hospital following an accident involving explosive potion ingredients; how they'd fallen in love, his father insisting he'd faithfully returned to visit the beautiful—and increasingly exasperated—healer who had saved his life, while his mother maintained she'd simply patched up an idiot who then refused to leave her alone for the next several months.
James had loved those stories so much that he'd never stopped to consider what they left out. It had always been his father telling them. His mother rarely spoke about the life she'd lived before she met him—before they had been a family, before James.
"I hated everything about England," she continued. "The weather. The food. The cold. The rain. The way I couldn't understand anyone." She gave a small shake of her head. "I felt so alone, I missed my parents. I missed home. I missed knowing where I belonged."
She fell silent for a moment, her expression distant.
"I think," she said eventually, "Arjun tried very hard to teach me English but I didn’t want to learn. It felt like he was trying to change me—to take the last bit of my home away from me. Eventually he became desperate. He convinced himself London was the problem. That if he could just get me somewhere quieter, somewhere greener, somewhere more like the stories people tell about England, things would get better. So he packed up everything we owned and moved us out of London and into the countryside. Derbyshire, to be exact."
"Did it help?"
His mother raised a dark arched eyebrow at him.
"No amount of fresh air, pretty cottages, or rolling green hills can fix a little girl who has lost her parents. I didn't want the countryside. I wanted to go home—to a home that didn't exist anymore."
She smiled then, quick and foxlike, her dark eyes crinkling at the corners.
"But, as luck would have it, there was something else in Derbyshire that did help. There was a family who lived a few miles away—the Bellamys—they had themselves recently moved to England from France and they had two daughters my age, Elaine and Eleanor.”
Something in his mother's words caught at the edge of James’s memory, a loose thread he couldn't quite grasp, there was something there, something familiar—something important.
"I still remember the first time I saw them peaking around the garden wall. I'd never met twins before, let alone identical ones. The way Arjun used to tell it, my eyes nearly popped right out of my head." She laughed softly. "They looked so alike that I thought it was some sort of magic—to make two people out of one. But it wasn’t and there they were—after a year of feeling as though I was the only little girl left in the world, suddenly there were two others standing on my doorstep asking if I wanted to come and play.
“It didn’t matter that I didn’t speak English. Eleanor made it her personal mission to refuse to let me get away with not understanding her. Whether she happened to be speaking French or English didn't particularly concern her.” She shot James an amused look.
“From the ages of eight until nine, I spoke a thoroughly bewildering mixture of the two that nobody but her and Elaine could fully understand.”
James frowned.
"So that's how you learnt French?" he asked.
“It is,” she said with a smile. “After a while—and thanks to Elaine, who was rather more methodical in her approach—I learnt to speak both separately.”
It had never occurred to him to ask. Looking back, it probably should have, but it was simply one of those things that had always existed in the background of his life. His mother spoke French sometimes to people in the hospital, in the same way she spoke Hindi and Punjabi to him and English to his father. There were French medical textbooks tucked away amongst the shelves in the library same as the way there were ones written in Hindi and English. It had always seemed like an unremarkable fact of who she was
As a child, he'd assumed that speaking several languages was simply the sort of thing clever people did. His mother was clever; therefore, of course she spoke French. It made perfect sense. As an adult, he realised that was a child's logic and that he probably should have asked.
"And it was a good thing too. Hogwarts was only a few years away, and my brother had been facing it with a little sister who, up until that point, had steadfastly refused to learn a word of English. I think he was at the end of his wits before we moved—before the girls got their hands on me. He was so grateful he used to let them both get away with murder. They could wrap him around their little fingers, and he let them."
“Did you stay friends—when you went to Hogwarts, I mean?”
“I did,” answered Effy. “Elaine and I had read everything we could about Hogwarts—found out as much as we possibly could—and when we learnt about the Sorting Ceremony, about how the students were divided into houses, I was so terrified we were going to be separated and I would be alone again that I barely remember walking across the Great Hall.
“I was so relieved when we were all put in the same house that I nearly fainted. We shared a dormitory with two other girls, Sylvia and Anne. In hindsight, I think they got the short end of the bargain, because we were terrors. I think we might even have given you and Sirius a run for your money with some of the mischief we got up to.
“They thought it was hilarious when I became a prefect. They were always cajoling me into covering for them, and I was forever running after them under the guise of trying to stop them breaking any more rules”—she smiled—“although I don't think I ever really tried all that hard, to be honest.”
Something shifted in James's stomach—something uncomfortable. He looked at his mother where she sat, with the slow sort of realisation that sometimes comes when a child looks at a parent and sees them not as a parent, but as a person, for the first time in their life.
James couldn't imagine having a child and never telling them about Sirius, about Remus, even Peter—about school and everything they'd got up to. And he was only just realising how odd it was that he knew all those stories from his dad. He knew about the time his father had accidentally blown up the Potions classroom. He knew about his dad's group of mates from school, some of whom he was still friends with now. He knew all about his father's life.
But he knew almost nothing about his mother. And that was strange, wasn't it?
He knew she'd been in Ravenclaw. Knew she was six years younger than his dad, so their time at school hadn’t overlapped in any meaningful way. Knew she'd been a prefect, then later Head Girl. But he didn't know anything else. He didn't know the ins and outs of her school years, didn't know the names of her friends—friends who, from the way spoke now, had clearly mattered.
“Why haven't you ever told me about them?” he asked.
“Because,” came the answer, “I got accustomed to keeping my secrets close to my chest. And because it hurt.”
There was sadness in his mother's eyes.
“For a long time it was easier not to talk about any of it. I never thought it would affect you. But I was wrong.” She smiled then—a sad, wistful thing. “You are the best parts of both of us, of me and your father—but I don’t think I ever realised—not until you brought Evan through the fire, just how alike you and I are. And I am so sorry for that, Jamie.”
Suddenly with the mention of Evan it clicked into place.
The tug of recognition James had felt.
A memory of Evan at the house surfaced—bandaged and pale. A conversation about middle names with a soft, hazy, pain-potion-addled Evan. A conversation that had slowly tipped towards something else—the same something they'd been circling ever since. The fact of James's feelings for Evan. A conversation that had sent James running out onto the hills afterwards, and in doing so had made him forget how the conversation had started. Forget the first part of it. Had overshadowed how they'd ended up talking about names in the first place.
“Evan's middle name is Bellamy,” James said slowly, almost cautiously.
His mother smiled. She looked down at her tea.
"Elaine always used to say she thought it was awfully unfair that it was the woman who had to give up her name for her husband."
His mother looked up then.
“She didn’t end up keeping her name when she married—but I’m glad she found a way to give it to her son nonetheless.”
James stared at her.
“Elaine was Evan's mother?”
“She was.”
“What happened to her?” James asked. “I mean, I know she died, but how—?”
“Something terrible,” said his mother. “But her death is not my story to tell—I suggest you ask Evan.”
Her dark eyes shone brightly.
“I can tell you that she was brilliant. The cleverest witch in our year. Loyal and caring and funny beyond belief. She was my best friend and I think I will miss her for the rest of my life.”
“Oh,” said James.
The knowledge that his mother had known Evan’s mother—that they had been friends—settled over him with an odd kind of weight. He wanted to ask more. Wanted to know when she'd died. Had they still been friends when James was born? Was there a version of his life where he might have grown up with Evan? The questions spun through his mind too quickly to grasp—
“What about the other sister?” he asked.
He didn’t think he remembered Evan ever talking about an aunt—not that Evan had such much about his family at all—
“She died too." His mother looked down as if steadying herself, and then she met his eyes. “Several years before Elaine. Eleanor was special. I mean, they both were, but Eleanor had a very rare gift. She always knew what people were feeling,” his mother smiled, it was a sad smile, “she used to say she could read hearts, and perhaps that's the most accurate description of her abilities. If someone was sad she knew exactly what to say to them to make them smile, if someone was angry she could calm them down with words alone, she knew what you wanted before you did—I’ve never seen a gift like hers ever before. She could have been very dangerous if she’d chosen to be—could have manipulated people, turned their emotions against them, but she didn’t. She used her abilities to make people happy—to make their lives better. She was incredible.”
His mother let out a laugh. It caught in her throat, and when James met her eyes he saw they were bright once more.
“Oh, she was dreadful in some respects. She always got what she wanted. There was never any point arguing with her. She was so very good at making people happy, at giving them just the right compliment, or playing to what they wanted that people would fall over themselves to please her—they’d give her whatever she asked for without a second thought and she used that to her advantage. She was cheeky and mischievous—and utterly insufferable most of the time because she was always poking her nose into places she shouldn’t. But I loved her.”
There was a pause.
“I loved her more than I had ever loved anything.”
For a moment, James simply stared at her. She watched him back as though waiting—waiting for something from him.
Then it hit him.
What she was telling him.
All the questions that had been fizzing through his mind—questions about Evan, about his mother—they all fell away, because he realised this was it. This was the point of the story she'd been telling him. His world shifted beneath his feet. His understanding of who his mother was shifted with it.
“You loved her?” he asked slowly, almost hesitantly.
The words sounded caught somewhere between disbelief and a small, fragile hope—as though he was hoping he hadn't misunderstood what she was telling him. What she was revealing to him.
“I did,” his mother said. “As a friend, yes, but not just as a friend. I was in love with her too. Utterly and hopelessly in love with her. And of course she knew. Knew long before I had figured it out.” A smile touched her lips. “I was sixteen when I finally worked up the courage to tell her, she just looked at me and said, 'Merlin, Eff. Took you long enough. I was beginning to think you were going to keep me waiting forever.’ I couldn't believe it. Somehow, out of everyone she could have chosen—and she could have had anyone, Jamie. She was so beautiful and impossible not to love—she wanted me.”
James stared at her. All of his life, his mother had simply been his mother.
Mum.
The woman who patched up his scrapes and told him off when he got into trouble. The woman who somehow always knew when something was wrong and exactly what to do about it. Someone he loved desperately—but never someone he'd imagined could love the way he loved.
Had loved the same way he had.
And with that came an overwhelming sense of relief—the relief that comes with being known. The relief of being understood. Of not being alone.
“You're like me,” he said.
The words sounded foolish the moment they left his mouth.
Yet his mother's smile softened.
“Yes, Sheru,” she said quietly. “I am.”
"What happened?" he asked tentatively. “To Eleanor? How did she die?”
“She got sick,” said his mother.
The words were simple. Matter-of-fact. Somehow that made them worse.
“Somewhere in her family history, someone placed a blood curse on one of her ancestors. It manifested in her. I don't know why it affected her and not Elaine but it did."
She swallowed.
"It happened in our last year of school. At first it wasn’t so bad—we thought she could beat it. She fought it with everything she had—but in the end it took her anyway."
For a moment she was quiet.
"She was your age when she died."
James felt something twist painfully in his chest.
"I chose healing because of her. I was so certain I'd find a way to save her but I couldn’t.”
She let the words hang there for a little while and then she continued.
“I didn't handle her death well and Elaine paid for it," she said with a sigh. "I was so angry. Angry at myself for failing. Angry at the world for taking her away. Angry because I couldn't even grieve properly because no one but Elaine knew who she really was to me. It didn't matter that we would have married the minute we left school if we could have. It didn't matter that she was my family, my whole world, because we didn’t live in a world that would accept that, that would accept us."
James thought suddenly of Regulus. Of hiding. Of pretending. Of how much he'd hated it. He remembered how alone he'd felt after Regulus died. The loss had been made worse by the fact that nobody in his life—nobody but Evan—knew he had lost anything at all. He tried to imagine it. Tried to picture what it would have been like if he and Regulus had still been together when Regulus died.
He couldn't.
The grief James had felt when Regulus had died belonged to a relationship that had already ended. To memories. To what might have been. It wasn’t comparable.
"I'm so sorry, Mum," he said quietly.
"So am I,” said his mother—and then she sighed, “for so many things, but most of all for the way I acted. I wasn’t the only person who lost someone—Elaine lost her sister and I was too angry—too heartbroken—to be there for her. The awful thing is that I knew exactly what she needed. She needed her best friend. She needed me to help her carry it."
She paused and then, sounding very tired and sad said:
"And I couldn't. Instead I wallowed in my own grief and I let her drown alone in hers—let her marry a man I despised—a man I knew was rotten—all because I was too trapped in my own grief to help her—I should have frog marched her right out that relationship and away from Marcus Rosier: but grief does terrible things to people, it made her vulnerable and unable to see who the man offering her comfort really was—it made me selfish and unable to see past my own pain.”
“And then what happened?” asked James.
His mother smiled, it was small but genuine.
"And then I met your father."
James blinked.
“He was kind and sweet and impossibly persistent. We became friends first. At the time, I was quite determined never to fall in love again.”
The smile on her face deepened.
“But your father has always possessed a particular talent for making the impossible happen.”
A faint laugh escaped her.
“Somehow, he managed to make me feel human again—and then even to give love another chance.”
The sadness returned almost immediately.
“But I'd left it so long with Elaine. We tried, for a while after I surfaced, but we were never what we'd once been. I don't think she could ever fully forgive me for leaving her—or for falling in love again. I think, in her eyes, I was replacing Eleanor. She never said it outright, but I think she felt it. And it was hard for me too. She looked so much like Eleanor. Sometimes it hurt just to look at her, and she knew that.”
A long silence followed.
“Then I had you.”
She looked at him fondly.
"I was in my own world—wrapped up in the joy of you and your father—it was such a relief after so much pain. A year after you were born Elaine wrote and told me she was pregnant. I was on duty when she was admitted—I stayed after my shift to sit with her—"
She smiled.
"Twins, of course. She was so happy." For a moment his mother seemed lost in the memory. “Children change everything. We were, both of us, living such different lives then—it seemed easier to let go of each other than it was to face all the pain that was left between us. We saw each other a few times when you were all very young—” his mother frowned, a look of distaste crossing her face, “but Marcus never approved of me, and couldn’t stand him. I suspect he did everything in his power to discourage Elaine from seeing me.”
Her eyes softened.
“But I still saw her sometimes. There was once with you—we were at St Mungo's visiting your uncle. It was shortly before he died, and you were kicking up a terrible fuss. It was hot, you didn't want to be there, and your father was away consulting for the Ministry—off in America for one reason or another. I knew Arjun was going to die soon. I didn't want to accept it, and I was scolding you something dreadful—and then there she was. I don't know why she was there. She hated hospitals—had spent so much of her life in them when Eleanor was sick—but regardless she knelt down and asked you if you liked Quidditch.”
She smiled at him.
“She told me to go and spend some time with Arjun while I still could, that you would be just fine with her for an hour to two. When I found you afterwards, the two of you were in Fortescue's. You had the biggest chocolate sundae I'd ever seen, and Elaine had put a blob of ice cream on the end of her nose and was pretending she couldn't work out why you were laughing at her.”
James thought about it. Tried to summon the memory, and couldn't.
A small wave of grief washed over him. Half for his mother, wishing he could remember for her sake—half for himself, he would’ve liked to have a memory of Elaine Bellamy—someone who had mattered to two of the people loved most.
“I wish I could remember that.”
His mother nodded as if she wasn’t surprised. “You were very young. Five, I think. You were laughing so hard you had tears streaming down your little cheeks.”
James smiled.
She looked down at her tea.
“Elaine died a few years later.”
She was silent for a long minute—-staring down into her tea. When she finally looked back at him, her eyes were full of unshed tears.
“I've never forgiven myself for the way I left things with her. I always thought there'd be more time. More time for us to find our way back to each other. More time to apologise. More time to fix what Eleanor’s death had broken between us. For years, I blamed myself for Eleanor. I convinced myself that if I'd done something differently—if I’d been a better healer—then perhaps she'd still be alive.”
She gave a small shake of her head.
“But it wasn't my fault. It was a tragedy. She died, and there was nothing I could have done to stop it. That wasn’t the case with Elaine. I didn't lose her because fate was cruel. I lost her because I let it happen. Because I kept telling myself there would always be another chance.”
She swallowed hard.
“And one day my chance was taken away.”
James frowned.
“Mum—”
She cleared her throat and wiped at her eyes. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier.
“Evan looks just like her, you know. I knew exactly who he was the second you put him on my table.” She gave him a sly, if slightly watery, smile. “Even with half his insides on the outside.”
James let out a startled laugh.
“He reminds me of her,” she said, shaking her head. “Quipping about a sick note for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. That was just like her. She was always poking fun at the things everyone else was too frightened to laugh at.”
Her expression softened, the slyness giving way to something warmer.
“He’s an exceptionally brave young man. I think she'd be very proud of him. I'm very glad I got to meet him, Jamie.”
There was a pause, and then she added softly.
“And I hope I get the chance to know him better.”
Something tightened painfully in James's chest. He hadn't realised how desperately he'd wanted to hear those words until she'd spoken them. That his mother approved of Evan. That she saw the man James saw. That she understood, even if only in part, how special Evan was. That he didn't have to defend why Evan mattered to him. Didn't have to explain.
“I love him,” said James.
He hadn't meant to say it. Not really. The words had simply slipped out. But he realised he didn't regret them. If anything, they felt good.
She reached across the space between them and squeezed his hand.
“I know, Sheru.”