Introduction

I didn’t want to write this story. It is my story and it is none of your business. You have no right to know how the years of my youth were spent or whom I spent them with.

But that trash-writing, stupid, undeserving cow, Rita Skeeter, and her meddling, lying quill decided that you lot deserved the "truth" about my life. She took it upon herself to try to drag my personal affairs out into the spotlight so that all you good people with your newly safe, little lives could gape at the memories that have haunted me all these years.

I burned the letter from her first owl.

I ignored the next fourteen.

When she showed up at my doorstep, acid green quill and parchment floating behind her, I knew that this was inevitable.

I opened the door with my wand in hand and a hex on my lips, but that infuriating quill had already begun to write. A furious Finite was enough to knock it to the ground, and I snatched the parchment from Skeeter’s mannish, but rather nicely manicured hands.

Persephone Starrett lives alone in a tiny glen in Scotland, the low-branched trees and slowly winding mist a shroud of guilt and shame to hide her from prying eyes. She’s still beautiful at seventy-four, a small but regal figure with long, dark hair and dark blue eyes, but there’s a sad emptiness to her that speaks of years of self-imposed suffering.

This compassionate reporter has come to relieve her of her shame, to free the vict—

She’d always had a flair for the dramatic. I remember running into Rita and her mother in Diagon Alley when she was a teenager—I would guess about fifteen years old. That brunette terror—she’s not a natural blonde, not that she would admit it—was throwing the most spectacular tantrum I had ever seen over a stationery set at Flourish and Blotts. She spouted an array of nasty lies about her mother in an attempt to win over the gathering crowd, but the effect was ruined when, in all the excitement, Little Miss Skeeter forgot the pressing bodily function that had caused them to enter the shop in the first place.

I still chuckle every time I think of that snotty little girl in her suddenly damp robes. I bet she’s never told that story to her Quick-Quotes Quill.

I burned that waste of a feather in Rita Skeeter’s face and shut the door.

Then I grabbed my own parchment and my own Dictaquill.

If you’re going to read my story, it is going to be in my words, not in the worthless drivel Rita Skeeter writes. It isn’t an easy story to tell, and I certainly don’t trust a reporter the Daily Prophet thinks is worthwhile to be skilled enough to tell it accurately.

I refuse to be painted as some tragic heroine suffering in silence for the foolishness of her youth. I live in isolation because I don’t like most people. If I were trying to pay a penance, I would be living in Hogsmeade, surrounded by the inanity of you annoying people, not enjoying a profitable business and a cottage with a lovely view.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have regrets about what happened. I hold no illusions about what I’ve done—I was no silly lovesick girl, no helpless victim. I’ve never tried to romanticize who Tom was, what we did, who we were.

It might have been easier on you to read Rita Skeeter’s version of my life. But this is not about what is easy. This is about the truth, and the truth is always hard to swallow.