Christmas passed. Hermione went back to the Ministry. Kevin's holiday stretched on agreeably.
She noticed, in the days that followed, that he was spending unusual amounts of time with her parents. Long afternoons at theirs, sometimes without her — returning home in good spirits and volunteering very little information. Her mother wore the expression of someone who knew a secret and found it enormously satisfying. Her father had started making pointed comments about the importance of good timing in all its forms.
Hermione waited. Kevin was planning something. He always was. Whatever it was, she would find out when he decided she should, and not a moment before.
It arrived on a Thursday in late January, when the light was already fading by the time her last meeting ended and the Ministry atrium was beginning to thin. Hermione was reaching for her coat when her colleague Sandra appeared at the office door with an expression of barely contained excitement.
"Your boyfriend's downstairs."
Hermione went to the window.
The atrium below was marble and fountains and the last tide of the working day. Kevin was leaning against the low wall near the main fountain — trench coat, her scarf wrapped around his neck (he'd appropriated it weeks ago and she'd stopped requesting its return), hands in his pockets, watching the flow of Ministry workers head for the fireplaces with the patient ease of someone with nowhere else to be.
He looked up. Found her window, as he always managed to do. Raised one hand.
The office erupted around her.
She grabbed her bag and fled the teasing at speed, which only made it worse.
She reached the atrium floor and was two strides from reaching him when Harry and Ron stepped directly into her path.
They'd just finished their shift. They'd spotted Kevin at the exact wrong moment.
"Kevin!" Ron's face lit up. "When did you get here? Drinks — you're coming — I caught a dark wizard today, boss gave me a commendation—"
He had Kevin by the arm before Kevin could finish his opening sentence.
"Ron, congratulations, genuinely, but I'm actually not here—"
"Bros before everyone! Drinks!"
"We could all go," Harry started, and then looked up and saw Hermione crossing the atrium toward them with the specific expression that meant someone was about to make a sensible decision in order to survive.
"Harry," he said quickly, "I just remembered Sirius asked me to pick something up—"
He was already retreating.
Ron, who had not yet looked behind him, felt the temperature change and turned.
Hermione. Three feet away. Arms at her sides. Her expression was perfectly composed and said everything necessary.
"Kevin," Ron said, releasing his arm. "My mother needs — I just remembered —"
"Go," Kevin said.
Ron went.
Hermione reached him. She looked up at him for a moment, lips pressed together against something.
"You're an Auror now," she said. "Are your witnesses always that reliable?"
"He caught a dark wizard today."
"I heard." She took his hand. "What are you actually doing here?"
"Free afternoon. Wanted to take you to dinner."
"Just like that."
"Just like that."
She studied him — looking, as she sometimes did, for whatever was underneath the surface of the thing he was saying. He gave her nothing.
"All right," she said.
They emerged into Muggle London in the last of the sunset — the sky in the gaps between buildings doing something extraordinary in pink and gold, the kind of winter sky that arrives briefly and fades before you've quite finished looking at it.
They walked. Hand in hand, unhurried, talking about the accumulated small things of the week — the kind of conversation that isn't about anything in particular and somehow covers everything. Dinner at their usual restaurant, good food, easy pace, the comfortable rhythm of two people who have long since run out of things to be awkward about.
Afterwards, they found a park.
January had cleared the paths of everyone else. The grass was frost-edged, the benches empty, the lampposts making warm circles of gold on the ground. And snow had begun to fall — light, the winter's first, each flake catching the lamplight on the way down.
"Here," Kevin said, nodding at a bench at the edge of a pool of light.
He kept them warm — a quiet, barely-there charm that settled around them like a second coat. She tucked into his side without being asked.
"Tired?"
"Not really." She tilted her head back and watched the snow fall past the lamp in slow diagonals. "Just very calm all of a sudden. I can't explain it."
He said nothing. She could feel him thinking beside her.
"Kevin."
"Mm."
"Whatever you've been planning — my father has been terrible at keeping it to himself. He hasn't said anything. He's just been very obviously happy."
A pause. "…He told you."
"He didn't tell me a thing. That's how I knew." She looked up at him. "So. Whenever you're ready."
He looked at her. The snowflakes caught in her hair and dissolved.
"I need your help with something," he said.
"Scheming?"
"The opposite, actually."
He reached into his coat and produced a folded piece of parchment and a pen, and held them out.
She took it. Unfolded it.
A Lifetime Partnership Agreement.
Her hands went still.
She read his name. Hers. The date, written precisely. Then the body of it — formal in its structure, in the way things written for someone who values precision tend to be, and underneath that formality, in the specific commitments nested between the clauses, unmistakably him. Some were quiet and serious. A few were almost embarrassingly sincere. One, toward the bottom, made her exhale a short helpless sound that was halfway to a laugh.
She looked up.
Kevin was watching her with an expression she knew. Very still. Very certain.
"Hermione," he said. "Marry me. Be my partner — for all of this, whatever it becomes. Build a home with me."
She tackled him.
Both arms around him, face pressed into his chest, the parchment in her hands. She was shaking slightly and made no attempt to stop it. She held on as though he might otherwise not be entirely real, and he held her back with one hand moving slowly between her shoulders, saying nothing.
After a long moment she pulled back. She looked at the parchment.
"I need to sign this before either of us changes our mind."
"I am not going to change my—"
She already had the pen uncapped. Her signature went down in the clean, decided hand she used for legal documents.
Kevin made the sound of a man who was exasperated and amused and fond, all at once and in roughly equal measure.
The parchment lifted. Both parchment and pen rose into the air wrapped in a soft white glow, folded themselves into a small square, and descended into Kevin's palm as a box.
He stood.
He stepped away from the bench, turned to face her, and went down on one knee. The lamplight was behind him. The snow fell past it in slow lines.
The box opened.
A silver ring inside — simple and fine, a single stone that held the light and gave it back.
Hermione's hand was over her mouth. She was looking at him, not the ring — kneeling in the snow with his eyes steady on hers — and she thought, quite clearly, that she would remember this exact version of this moment for the rest of her life.
He took her hand. Slid the ring on.
Her right hand.
She looked down.
He drew breath for what was clearly the properly composed conclusion to everything he'd been building toward.
"Kevin," she said.
"Hermione—"
"That's the wrong hand."
He stopped.
He looked at her right hand. The ring on her right-hand ring finger. He looked up at her.
"…Is it."
"Wedding rings go on the left. Always have."
"I thought ring finger was—"
"It isn't, they're different—" She started to explain and then saw his face and stopped. The extraordinarily composed, disaster-resistant, danger-navigating person currently kneeling in a public park in January was staring at her right hand with the expression of a man whose careful architecture had encountered an unanticipated wall.
She started laughing.
Not politely. Properly — from the chest, uncontrollable. She pressed her left hand over her mouth and it didn't help at all.
Kevin attempted to remove the ring. It had seated itself quite neatly and was not immediately forthcoming. He fumbled slightly. He got it most of the way off and very nearly dropped it, caught it, and Hermione was now laughing so hard she needed to grab the back of the bench for support.
She stood up. Took his hand and pulled him to his feet. Held out her left hand, and he slid the ring on — correctly this time, perfectly, exactly where it should be — and it caught the light from the lamppost and looked completely right.
She cupped his face in both hands.
"For what it's worth," she said, eyes still bright with it, "that was perfect."
"I put it on the wrong hand."
"You were nervous. It's allowed." She leaned up and kissed him — not quick, not brief, but with the unhurried warmth of someone who has arrived at a decision and is entirely comfortable with it. His hands came to her waist. The snow fell past the lamp above them. Everything else was still.
When they finally pulled apart their foreheads were resting together, breath mixing in the cold air between them.
"You cannot do that at the actual wedding," she murmured.
"I know. Left hand."
"Left hand. Yes."
"I have it."
"Good." She laughed again, soft and private. "My answer is yes, by the way. In case the tackle wasn't clear enough."
"It was unambiguous," Kevin said, and she could hear the smile in it without needing to see it.
They stood in the snow together for a long time, in no hurry whatsoever to be anywhere else.