She wakes to a sickly sweet smell, like spilled wine, and a piece of paper sitting like a death threat on the kitchen table. There is no one on the other side of her bed.

The writing on the paper is tiny, carved viciously with a graphite pencil. It reads only: Whatever I was, I wasn't drunk. That was five years of my life, you bitch. She screams once. Then she is silent.

Merope Gaunt will never be Merope Riddle.

She sits in the same chair all day, feeling only the steady thump of her broken heart, and the small stirrings from the bulge in her belly. She doesn't jump at the sound of a hammer from outside. She stares at the upturned bottle of love potion, watches it drip from the table to a sticky puddle on the floor.

When she finally does move, the moon is the only thing that illuminates the house. She steps outside. It would be almost poetic, her moonlight-bathed misery, but for the eviction notice nailed forcefully to the door behind her.

She doesn't go back inside, not even to put shoes on. It's summer and she doesn't care about the future. The grass of the tiny lawn is already frigid with dew, but she doesn't feel it. She could be a ghost, on the streets of London, with her long face framed by stringy blond hair, the large locket bouncing on her thin chest, and the white nightgown she never took of blowing gently when she walks.

The doorway she finds to sob in belongs to a Muggle bakery. The baker finds her there in the moring, asleep. He yells at her, but she doesn't respond, even when she awakens. A passing Muggle photographer snaps a picture of the scene for his collection, entitled City: Injust. Finally, she moves, and the baker glares at her retreating back. She doesn't know where she's going. The morning sky is misty. The wetness sticks to her skin.

xxxxx

She wakes to hunger gnawing at her belly. The air is made of ice, almost refusing to be pumped in and out of her tired lungs. She gets up, she walks. She has a purpose.

xxxxx

It isn't hard to die. The last things she senses are the whiteness of the ceiling above her and her own sigh hanging sticky in the air.