Learning to Live With Memories of Her

I watched the students coming into my classroom with wariness. This was it…. My hands shook slightly as I held up my class role and scanned it again, wishing that I had cancelled the lesson. I wasn’t ready for this. It had been fourteen years, but I still wasn’t ready. I doubted I ever would be.

Ilana Weasley made her way into the room, and I gave a small sigh of relief as she settled into the seat nearest the door, and farthest from me. Thank the gods for small favours.

She eyed me nervously, no doubt having heard stories of the evil Potions master from her parents all of her life. I glared at her, and she quickly turned her gaze from me, suddenly taking great interest in the other students.

Class went smoothly—a rarity, but a welcome one—and she was finally out of my sight. I was inexplicably glad to see her go, though not entirely sure why.

She looked nothing like her mother. Red hair and freckles, she was all Weasley. Her eyes were bright blue, and though she seemed to be the normal, happy child, she didn’t exude that confidence that her mother had possessed. For that I was infinitely grateful.

Perhaps it was the idea that, if I’d had my way, she would have been my child. No, that’s not true. No child of mine would ever look quite as beautiful or innocent as this one. I couldn’t help but wonder what our child would have looked like, if I had only had the courage to ask her to stay…. But that was in the past, and there was no hope of changing it.

Besides, the girl’s mother was happy, and wasn’t that what mattered most of all? She had a husband who loved her, and though I wondered how she could have married the idiot that she had spent the better part of seven years barely recognizing as being male, it brought her happiness. She had three children, all little girls. I pitied them—they looked like their father—but thought them wonderful nonetheless. They were hers.

I also found them frightening. I could only imagine the horrible things that she had told them about me, and it terrified me. Not that I worried about my reputation with her children, or any children, for that matter. No, it was the idea of all of my transgressions, of all the hate and bitterness she held for me, being portrayed on her face and in her words that frightened me.

I’d tried to forget her. I had spent years searching for a life, a happiness of my own, but it never came, and I blamed her. She'd taken my only chance at true happiness with her when she left, and nothing had been the same since.

I attempted to drink away her memory, I tried burying myself in my work…. At times I was able to convince myself that I had sufficiently forgotten her, but it was always a short-lived assurance. She always weighed heavily on my mind, and I had stopped trying to force her from it years ago….

Wondering how I was going to get through the next eleven years and see all of her children pass through this school, I shook my head and found myself depressed, not for the first time, at the thought. They were living, breathing evidence of her happy life, a life without me, and I hated them. I had toyed with the idea of forbidding each of her daughters to have access to my classroom, freeing myself of the horror of having to stare into the eyes of at least one of them every day for the next decade, but I did not want to do anything that would betray the secret longing I had kept hidden from the world.

Deciding that perhaps it was time to consider retiring, I made my way to my private rooms and collapsed onto the four-poster bed that I’d slept in for twenty eight years. Finding comfort in the familiar, cool sheets, I pulled them around me and closed my eyes, praying that I would dream of her.