In our house the rule felt like "the funnier the book looks the more Mum will want to read it." A normal book that some fan sent to her? Skimmed through and placed aside for "someday when I have nothing better to do," she'd say with a laugh. A tiny book that it took ten minutes to find, open, and magnify the text so it was large enough to read? Intriguing, enough to spark a few of her warm laughs once in a while. An enormous book that could barely fit on the coffee table? Engrossing. Hugo's Puffskein could do what Puffskeins do across the room and she'd be none the wiser about it, lost in the book. (Perhaps literally-Dad had to go in after her to Dr. Wittenbaum's Moste Magickal Pop-Ups, but that's another story.)

The point being, when she received an enormous book that took three owls to deliver, flipped to the last few chapters, slammed it shut with an "Oh, for goodness' sakes," and relegated it to the growing pile under the coffee table, my interest was naturally piqued. All of nine at the time, I grabbed it after she'd left, and stared.

It seemed to be a copy of Hogwarts, A History. Which she only had three editions of already. Maybe the cover was a trick? It couldn't have been too dangerous, she had just gone ahead and opened it up...

So, clambering onto the couch, I did so myself. Yes, it was the very same book. I flipped through, and there were the handsome pictures I remembered, in brighter color than the faded copies I browsed through every once in a while. Dilys Derwent gave a pleasant wave as I paged by.

I went through to the end, trying to see what Mum had gotten so upset about, but there was nothing too strange. The last picture was a small shot of Neville Longbottom, an old friend of my parents', who took a minute to step into the frame; his face was dirty as if he'd been doing battle with some particularly combative Devil's Snare off the page. I smiled back at him, then shrugged and put the book away.

I didn't really think too much about it until I was packing up to go to Hogwarts myself. By that time, the book had migrated-as books in our house tend to do-to the second row deep of books, stored behind another layer altogether. It was the first one I could find on the shelf, and I chucked it in along with a bunch more in my suitcase. I still sort of remembered Mum having rolled her eyes at it, but part of me thought I had just misremembered it. It was just a normal book.

At school, it stayed propped up against the side of the trunk most of the time. I did have to dig it out once every few months to correct Scorpius Malfoy on one historical point or another-a lot of our classmates wound up going to us for advice, since we were the ones who stayed awake in class. (Except Albus, who pulled Es on his History of Magic essays without ever seeming to study. The git.)

Once in a while we'd get so into it that we-that is, I, Scorpius pretended not to care-would dig out library books just so we could settle the facts once and for all without having to go traipsing to the dormitories. I remember one day towards the end of my second year when Scorpius refused to concede that the Triwizard Tournament had been abandoned before the 1800s. I went ahead and looked it up right there and then, and sure enough, he was right.

Embarrassed, I hung out in the library the rest of the afternoon, rereading the venerable edition. Of course, there was nothing there to be dismissive of. Just the good old book.

And then one day early in fourth year, before the homework had piled too high, it was so hot everyone inside wanted to get outside, everyone outside wanted to get inside, but nobody wanted to move because that would make us even more sweaty. Finally Hera Gamp, a fifth year, declared she'd had enough of it and started wading in the lake. A bunch of us joined her, and while we might not have been setting the most appropriate example for our younger siblings, cousins, housemates, and anybody else, dousing Joni Harris with Aguamenti was the high point of my week.

Mostly because my week really dropped off after that.

It wasn't too bad at first. Just a cough here and a sniffle there. But by Saturday I could barely get out of bed. A house-elf brought me a pot to throw up in which I must have used a literal dozen times that day alone.

I eventually made my way to Madam Limnira's office, with Madam Limnira supporting me most of the way, and spent the rest of the weekend in bed drinking Pepper-Up Potion and then vomiting it back up. Apparently I had walking pneumonia, but walking, like everything else, felt past me.

My roommates came to visit me, and asked if there was anything they could get me. I said "a book," mostly trying to be funny, but sure enough Katrin Gull brought me Hogwarts, A History. I opened it without enough strength to pull that many pages back, and started reading from the second-to-last chapter.

Most of it seemed to be about Uncle Harry. I wasn't surprised-he was the most famous wizard of our time-but all the same, it was something else to read about him in the same words reserved for the founders.

When I got to the part about him slaying the basilisk of Slytherin, I paged back to the part about the Chamber of Secrets. This took a while, and all the way through I was thinking what that must have been like. Probably he was too scared at the time to realize what amazing things he was doing. He had always been a humble man.

When I got there, sure enough, the chapter read However, both these rumors were confirmed in 1993, when Harry Potter journeyed within the hidden room to slay the monster, in fact a fully-grown basilisk. It later came to light that Voldemort had been aware of the existence of both Chamber and monster, controlling it by Parseltongue to murder a schoolgirl (in his own time) and petrify several others (in his as well as Potter's).

So one young man could rewrite a millennium of history!

As I laboriously paged back through, I realized "young man" didn't even cut it. He'd done all that at Hugo's age!

I kept reading. There was Harry Potter, the boy who lived, fighting off Dementors. And then there came the Triwizard Tournament. Perhaps some glory hound could have snuck in underage. But what kind of person would compete in, and win, a tournament he didn't want to enter against much more experienced wizards?

There was a picture of the champions; Aunt Fleur was younger and seemed somehow more foreign. And there was Harry. He looked almost like Albus, and I watched him for a few minutes to pick up the difference (scar aside, obviously). There aren't that many photographs of Albus, relatively speaking, but if there were, he's the sort of person who would scurry in from the edges just to smile at you. Whereas Harry seemed like he'd have been just as happy to slip out of the frame.

No one understood him, I realized, no one knew-he didn't even really know-what he would still have to do. Only with hindsight did we recognize who he was. The Chosen One.

I flipped the page. There were the champions shivering by the lake. A caption told us that they had successfully completed the Second Task of the tournament. I cracked a smile-so we'd both had misadventures in the lake our fourth year, Harry and I. True, mine felt fine at the time, but who was to say that hadn't made me sick?

There was something of Dominique in Fleur's disappointed stance, but Harry looked more like himself than he did anyone else. I read onwards, not speed-reading like I did with my class books; I had nowhere else to go, after all. Harry in his fifth year, forming the underground "Dumbledore's Army." The feigned (well, sort of) assassination of Albus Dumbledore.

Then came what would have been my mum and dad's seventh year. Of course, they weren't at Hogwarts, so there wouldn't have been that much about them in a history of Hogwarts. Still, it was a bit of a jolt to see the paragraphs continuing on about Aunt Ginny and Professor Longbottom. They'd taken over Dumbledore's Army, yes, but it was still Harry's project.

And then the final battle at Hogwarts. I had heard all about this, of course-who hadn't?-but when I got to the part where people thought he really had been killed, I threw up again.

I was tired, but couldn't get to sleep. I lay in bed, trying to handle sips of the Pepper-Up Potion and feeling sorry for myself. And then getting angry at myself because Harry was able to let himself get killed for the greater good, wasn't he, and here I was couldn't handle a stupid little sickness...That didn't help me get to sleep, either.

So I started paging through the chapter again, more out of boredom than a desire to relearn the history. Yet somehow it wasn't quite like the assignments from school, where we just plodded through one chapter after the next. And as recent as the events were, they weren't even like the Daily Prophet, where one thing happened after another with no end in sight. The war had happened, and then it had been won. Harry had won it.

I got to sleep eventually, and must have woken up in the middle of the night, or whatever passed for "night" by the terms of my out-of-sync biological clock. I blinked-perhaps I had been dreaming, but when I wake up in the middle of a dream like that I do tend to remember them. Uncle Harry's well fit, isn't he? I vaguely thought to myself, and then some more awake part of me told myself that that was silly. I went back to sleep.

When I finally woke up I felt, while by no means better, much stronger than I had been the previous day. I was even able to nibble on a slice of toast together with the potions. I wanted to go back and do my schoolwork, but Madam Limnira wouldn't let me.

It didn't take much more than one overly-cautious glance at the book to confirm, yes, that Harry was indeed well fit. But instead of being able to shove that into a neat pile of Things Ascertained, it gnawed at me as I fitfully tried to get my strength back.

Look at Fleur, I tried to tell myself. Or Diggory, they're plenty attractive and that doesn't worry you. They were your age, just about, nothing wrong with finding people in pictures attractive. But Harry? I shivered, and had to rearrange my sheets again-I could never really get at a comfortable temperature.

Early in the afternoon, Albus came by to visit. I glanced at him, unsure what I was looking for-I certainly didn't want to find my cousin attractive on top of everything else. Maybe i just wanted to reassure myself that Harry didn't look any different than Albus, who was a sweet but perfectly normal wizard.

"You all right?" he asked.

"Eh," I shrugged. "I think it was my own stupid fault for wading in the lake."

"Nobody else got sick, did they? Doesn't matter, don't beat yourself up about it, that won't help."

"Thanks," I smiled weakly. "How are you?"

"Pretty good," he shrugged. "Professor Minogue was a great laugh, he was telling us this story about a goblin he met at a bar."

"Professor Minogue? At a bar?"

"Drinking sherry or something."

"Sherry? Since when have you been wondering what the professors drink?"

"Never mind the drink, okay, the point is about the goblin..."

The story, which Minogue had apparently tacked on a tangential moral to, didn't quite live up to the premise, but it was still something to take my mind off things. I felt very awake and refreshed by the time Albus turned to leave (which wasn't all for the best, because Limnira still refused to let me get my books).

As he left, part of me wanted to call out to him, to say Albus, could you stop by the library and pick up some books about our parents? But I knew that couldn't end well.

I guess I couldn't hide my expression, because Limnira turned and glared at me. "Another day's bedrest for you, young miss, then we'll see about getting you back to your studies."

Albus turned at the door and laughed. "She's going to get Os regardless."

I rolled my eyes. "Thank you, Albus."

"You're welcome," he said, flashing a large grin. "Does that hold for things to practice magic on, Madam Limnira? Hugo could probably bring her a hedgehog to transfigure."

"Shoo," said Limnira.

"It's all right, I can read books for fun," I said, pointing to where Hogwarts, A History lay open to the last chapter.

"You got that far in one day? S'pose with nothing else to do..."

"I started at the end, silly."

"Oh. Can I get you anything else?"

There it was-by avoiding the question I'd gotten him to ask it instead. Now I had no excuse. "If you don't mind, anything from the library about the history of the last...thirty, forty years? Just want to cross-reference some things. It's not for class," I sort of whined, and made a mental note not to use the word "cross-reference" in the hospital wing again.

Albus grinned, nodded, and slunk out before Limnira could protest. He came back half an hour later, three books tucked under his arm. "I had to explain they were for you," he said, "Grais was a little shocked to see me in there, checking out books on my own power."

"Thanks," I smiled.

And started reading again. There was one writer, who didn't even seem to be from the Quibbler, maintaining that Harry had claimed to wield the fabled Elder Wand when defeating Voldemort. That seemed to fit with a couple things I read, but of course Harry had never had an elder wand. And then there was one quoting his reputation among non-humans. (Mum would be so proud. Maybe she'd ghostwritten it.)

Why, if he was someone Mum could be proud of...it seemed to make him younger than her.

It wasn't fair, I sulked, skimming Rita Skeeter's Harry Potter: Chosen or Chump? (Some of it looked right, but the part about the tattoo? Had to be false...didn't it?) Most of the rest of the school was purebloods or halfbloods, they'd gotten to grow up with all the fun stories about Harry Potter. (I flipped open at random to hear a disgruntled Ministry ex-employee claiming something about smashing time machines. Yes, Mum had said she'd used a Time-Turner in her third year, but that didn't seem to make sense.) By the time they went to Hogwarts, probably, that would all be old hat. But no, my parents had to "try and give us a normal childhood" and downplay all the exciting parts. (Okay, so maybe I didn't care about his Quidditch records either, but still.) Until now, when I was fourteen and...

ugh. Ugh, I didn't even want to think about it.

And maybe that was my problem. Because after I got released (ish-I still had to come back and take potions before every meal, and Limnira made house-elves keep replacing my bedsheets so I couldn't infect anyone else), I was still so unnerved about hiding the...crush, if that was what it was, from people that I maybe went a little too far. I thought about trying to find a real boyfriend or something who was my own age, but I wasn't really close to that many boys outside my family, and Scorpius and I just didn't seem to have any alchemy.

I could hang up a picture of him somewhere, I figured, but why bother? There were books all around my room, those were good enough.

You're practically on a first-name basis with the guy, Rose. Nobody else in your room can say that. Write him an owl, do something.

So I took out my quill. Dear, I wrote, ink poised over what should have been the U in Uncle.

But it never came.

Because, I realized, to my relief, I didn't have a crush on Uncle Harry, and I never had.

Unfortunately, that didn't help things any.

Because I still did have a crush on Harry Potter. The Boy who Lived. The Chosen One. All sorts of epithets, pulled tightly around him like an Invisibility Cloak, obscuring the man within. The man who had chosen to try and downplay his fame, to marry and have children and go to the office every day. For all I couldn't understand it, that modesty was part of who he was, and part of what I loved in spite of myself.

I sat there, quill still in hand, until a drop of ink finally fell down to spell nothing. Angrily snapping out of it, I replaced the quill in my ink jar and then just folded the blank parchment in halves, quarters, eighths, folding and recreasing in every direction, holding it over the wastebasket, until I could flick it into the trash.

Wasteful, but I was past caring.

I turned back to books, the next few weeks, as Gryffindor trounced Slytherin and Hufflepuff edged past Ravenclaw at Quidditch. As I got mostly Os, and only two more detentions the rest of the term. (I'd never gotten on with Professor Pippingsley anyway.) I turned to books because I knew there'd be some even farther off the wall than Skeeter's rambles. I almost hoped they'd say something bad about Harry (not embarrassing, I could have always written home for embarrassing). I was half-hoping for cruel, slanderous, upsetting. Anything to convince me he wasn't worth falling in love with.

And though I found some truly bizarre theories (the prophecies had the wrong person, he was actually training to be a Dark Lord himself, he'd fathered secret children by my mum of all people), I couldn't believe any of them. People were cynical, ready to make a cheap joke at anyone's expense; they'd forgotten that they owed him the lives of everyone they loved. Or maybe they'd just never been told in the first place.

The ride home from school was nervous for the first half-hour or so; I kept glancing over at Albus and worrying about what would happen when we got off the train. Just keep your mouth shut and you'll be fine, I told myself, but that seemed a lot easier unsaid than done. Scorpius inadvertently helped out by expressing his worry about the long Transfiguration essays we'd turned in on the last day of term; by the time we were arguing over footnotes, Katrin had kicked us out of the compartment and we spent the rest of the trip talking with Moira Rappoport, my cousin Louis, and some more of their sixth-year friends.

When we pulled into the London station, I grabbed my suitcases and hurriedly found Hugo, who was unashamedly crawling under the seats in search of a runaway Chocolate Frog. By the time I'd Summoned it away and insisted, against his protests, we really did need to throw it away, we were almost the last people off the train. Mum and Dad were right there and we were able to get home quickly.

We didn't all get together until Christmas Day itself, in the afternoon. Molly and Aunt Fleur were ruling the kitchens with iron mitts, Grandmum and Granddad keeping watchful eyes on them. Uncle Bill and I got to talking about a Quibbler article he'd read about secrets of the pyramids. (I had to look it up, but some of the crackpot Arithmancy about pi was actually correct!)

And then, Uncle Harry caught my eye.

Maybe I should have shook him off, dived back into the magazine discussion, but part of me thought if I talked things over with him I could...I could...What could I do? In spite of myself, I smiled back.

"Happy Christmas!" he said.

"H-happy Christmas," I stuttered. Stupid.

"How's-no, don't tell me." Could he see through me? He couldn't, he couldn't. "I'm sure Hogwarts is fine, you're doing better than you think you are, and you're very glad to be home for break."

I sighed weakly, leaning into a patched-over couch. "Got it in one."

He grinned, and there was something of the child in his smile. "Magic."

"Er-d'you mind if-could I ask you a question?" I blurted.

He slowly adjusted his glasses before replying. "All right. But...I mean, yes."

"I don't...I don't know, maybe it's something I should go to my mum and dad about. But...I borrowed this book from Mum, before starting school."

"Oh?" He looked concerned. That was Harry, always ready to jump in and try to help someone. "What happened?"

"Nothing! I mean I just read it...it's Hogwarts, A History."

"And your mum's upset because you had to pry it out of her fingers?"

I rolled my eyes. "She only has about three other copies."

He laughed. "Fair enough. So what do you need?"

"I...it's just hard for to understand...you and my parents I guess tried so hard to make us not be celebrities, make us be normal kids. But that means I never got to grow up understanding who you really were, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley and, and Harry Potter. So it's sort of hitting me all at once and..." and I've fallen in love with this myth.

"With the way you go through books, it took you that long?"

"I know!" I said, trying to hold myself in and not cause a scene. It was Christmas.

"I"m sorry," said Uncle Harry, and he reached down to hug me.

I stiffened as he did, and when he pulled away, just a lanky man, emotions were spinning through me. It was harder to summon up the love I had been so confident in moments ago, and with this difficulty came immense relief, of course. Now I was just angry. Angry at my parents, at Harry, at everyone for leaving me to this.

"When I came to Hogwarts," he said, "I made friends with your mum, who grew up in a Muggle house like me, but had already read all these books that talked about me. I lived with your dad, with Neville, with Sea-Seamus Finnegan," he stammered, "who all had wizard parents. And Dean Thomas, who didn't know anything about magic, but a few months in was celebrating my Quidditch talent along with everyone else. It was weird. Not always pleasant."

"I get it. I get it, you wanted to outgrow it, but-" But at that cost? I wanted to say, except without admitting anything. I was nervous for weeks, I couldn't tell anyone...

"I hope," he said slowly, "that we-I mean, your parents, mostly, but also Aunt Ginny and I-that we haven't tried to make you unaware of history. What, what we wanted all of you to grow up knowing was that your parents were some...some people who lived in funny times and had a lot of responsibilities, but that there were lots more people who had important parts to play too."

"Yeah," I muttered.

But maybe...maybe it had worked out, after all. Other children might hero-worship Harry Potter without ever really getting to know him. As old as I was, and as humiliating as this episode had been, it wasn't like anybody had caught on. And now that I was old enough to sort through books on my own, maybe...

"Do you...would it be all right if I asked you about it? Every once in a while, I mean," I rushed to add. "Just, what it was like, being The Boy Who Lived? The Chosen One?"

He smiled. "I think that's fair. Do you know, I always liked being the chosen one more."

"Really? Does it make a difference?"

"I think it does. See, most people assumed that "chosen" meant...meant chosen by prophecy, or something, and that's...that's a silly thing to believe. But when Voldemort chose me to try and kill, well, that was a bad choice on his part. I think it's worth remembering that everybody's choices matter, even..."

"Even genocidal maniacs'?"

"That's what I was looking for, yep."

And we both laughed.

I guess not many people can say that they spent Christmas Day of their fourth year on their grandparents' couch, getting their first crush to laugh at their joke. I'm not sure if I can, either. I'm not sure whether I just fell in love with the Boy Who Lived, who had already passed into history, or with the man who laughed alongside me.

But I do love him; with a niece's love, nothing to be ashamed of, and secretly mixed in with all that some deeper gratitude to the man who saved us all.